


The 32nd Annual IFTEC

by ionizable



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, Nerd Alert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-03-05
Packaged: 2018-03-09 21:24:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 41,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3264836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ionizable/pseuds/ionizable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>University AU where Root and Shaw have been forced to work together to plan and run their school's engineering competition. </p><p>In no particular order, there will be: "oops I accidentally fell in love with you" Root, an excruciatingly slow build, jealous Shaw, jealous Root, donut thievery, eventual smut, backstories, nerdiness, things moving right along to the complex plane after the midpoint, and most importantly: cheesy science jokes! bad puns and corny jokes!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. T-minus 8 weeks

“Um, excuse me, you can’t—”

“It’s alright, Leon,” Root says cheerfully as she strolls past the front desk into the Dean’s office. “Harold’s expecting me.”

“Oh, there you are,” Finch says as Root walks in. “Have a seat, Ms. Groves.”

He directs a reassuring nod behind her, presumably at his departmental assistant, and Root hears an exasperated huff as Leon walks away, muttering, “I don’t get paid enough for this.”

She takes a look at the small, surly-looking girl sitting in her normal perch on the bookcase across from Finch’s desk. Narrowing her eyes in distaste at the only other place to sit in the office, she pastes a flippant smile on her face as she settles into the stiff-backed visitor’s chair.

“What’s up, Harry?” she asks.

She hears a faint _tsk_ escape the girl who usurped her usual seat, but doesn’t bother turning around to acknowledge her.

Finch clears his throat. “Ms. Groves, I’d like you to meet Sameen Shaw. Ms. Shaw, this is Samantha Groves.”

Root tosses her hair back as she smiles over her shoulder, trying to remember why the name sounds familiar. “Call me Root,” she says, insistently but pleasantly.

Shaw doesn’t bother replying, the vague frown on her face firmly in place, but her dark eyes meticulously sweep Root up and down. She finally nods curtly, then turns her attention back to Finch. Root turns around, feeling almost as though she was just dismissed, and a small smile creeps onto her face.

“Why’s she here?” Shaw asks Finch. “Harold,” she adds after a moment, and Root can hear a faint smirk in her voice, as if this is the first time she’s referring to the Dean of Engineering and Natural Sciences by his first name.

Shaw’s voice is surprisingly smooth and level, and Root cocks her head slightly, still watching Finch in front of her, but growingly steadily more curious about the girl behind her.

Finch folds his hands on his desk, looking about as ambiguously pleased as imaginable for him.

“Ms. Shaw is one of our highest-achieving 3rd year biomedical engineering undergraduates at IFT,” he tells Root. She can detect faint hints of pride in his voice, and she wonders what the story is there. “She approached me quite some time ago, expressing an interest in becoming more involved with extracurricular activities in the IFT community.”

Root raises her eyebrows silently. It’s difficult for her to imagine Shaw expressing interest in anything. She’s finally remembered why Shaw’s name was familiar – her file had been one of the many Root had been poring over a few weeks ago.

Clearing his throat, Finch shifts in his chair a bit before addressing Shaw. “And Ms. Groves… is a particularly gifted 4th year computer engineering undergraduate.”

Root smiles sweetly. “Why, thank you, Harry.”

“As both of you may be aware, the annual IFT Engineering Competition – IFTEC – is fast approaching. Each year, our top students are involved in organizing and participating in IFTEC, with minimal support from staff and faculty, in order to proceed to the state engineering competition. Last year IFT placed in the top third in 4 of 7 categories at State, and we are steadily improving our showing at the Nationals. This year, however, IFT has won the bid to host State, and so our local engineering competition needs to showcase the very best and brightest we have to offer at our school.”

He notes the unimpressed look on Root’s face, and probably a similar expression on Shaw’s as well.

“I am delighted,” he pauses, then shakes his head minutely and continues, “I am delighted to be able to offer you both the opportunity to co-Chair the IFTEC Committee this year.”

Noting the lack of change in their expressions, he adds, “And I would be delighted to write you as many letters of reference as you require for your medical school applications, Ms. Shaw.”

“Fine,” Shaw says shortly from behind Root. “Thanks… Harold.”

Root smiles crookedly at Finch. “And for me, Harry?”

Finch spares a stern glance at her. “You’re aware of how this will benefit you, Ms. Groves.”

She shrugs and smiles. “Alright, then.”

Root looks down and smiles faintly into her lap, practically hearing the reluctant curiosity buzzing from behind her. Not that she doesn’t already enjoy playing the enigmatic outsider, but she expects it’ll be exponentially more fun to bait her grumpy co-Chair than anything else she had planned for this semester.

With a pleasantly small amount of surprise, she realizes she’s looking forward to this experience, but quickly schools her face into the same inscrutably insolent expression from before. It wouldn’t do to show all her cards to Finch, much less Shaw, quite yet.

A few seconds of silence descend as Finch looks doubtfully between the two of them. “Very good. I will put you both into contact with John Reese, who works out of my office as the undergraduate student affairs liaison.”

Root’s familiar with Reese, who graduated only a few years before. She snorts silently at the thought of an industrial engineering graduate working in a university as a glorified babysitter, of all things, but is careful not to let Finch see what she thinks of his favourite pet.

“Mr. Reese has extensive knowledge with the workings of previous IFTECs, and will no doubt be an invaluable resource for you in the planning process.”

The agreeable smile Root sends his way, and the undoubtedly irritable frown probably being sent from Shaw, seem to unsettle Finch further, as though he’s beginning to become cognizant of the fact that he may have made a very large mistake.

“That will be all,” he announces. “IFTEC will be held eight weeks from now, so I suggest you begin the planning process immediately.”

Root hears Shaw jump off the bookcase lithely and make her way out of the office without another word. With a languid smile, she rises out of her chair and winks at Finch before nonchalantly catching up with the little grouch. It isn’t difficult, her legs are probably twice the length of Shaw’s.

“So, Sameen,” she says. “Can I call you Sameen?”

“No.”

“Alright, Sam,” she pauses and looks down, pleased to see an eyeroll for her efforts, “So can I get your number?”

Shaw stops abruptly and squints mistrustfully up at Root for a second.

Taken aback when Shaw suddenly grabs her hand and a pen from her pocket to write with, Root studies Shaw’s pursed lips and intent brows. She winces a little at the sharp point of the pen digging into her skin, but lightly flexes her hand in Shaw’s warm one to give her better access.

Shaw nearly thrusts Root’s hand back at her when she’s done. “I gave you my email. It’s faster and we won’t have to talk as much that way.”

Tapping at her chin thoughtfully, Root watches Shaw’s eyes follow the scribbles on her hand. “But what if I need you for something really _urgent_?”

She can only describe the look on Shaw’s face to be a frozen sort of disapproval, held carefully in check. “Find someone else.”

With that, Shaw turns and strides away.

Root smiles after her for a second, then makes her way down the same hallway. She waves her fingers happily at Shaw, who’s just turned to see if the clicking sounds of Root’s heels were really following her, then slowly twirls her hair in amusement as Shaw’s little legs start moving even faster.

She follows Shaw into a classroom and slides into the seat next to her at the front. She can see Shaw watching her out of the corner of her eye, but is happy to sit in silence as long as Shaw refuses to ask her what she’s doing.

They sit in an awkward, uncomfortable silence for four entire minutes, watching the rest of the class trickle in. Shaw’s eyes keep meeting hers accidentally, only to dart away as soon as they do. Root keeps watching her blatantly, chin tucked into her palm, entertained with the way Shaw manages to make every single little fidget look _angry_.

A small laugh escapes her accidentally when Shaw manages to drink her water and scratch her nose all while maintaining the exact same scowl.

Shaw’s gaze flicks over to her, and finally she sets her bottle down heavily and asks, “What’s your problem, Groves?”

“Root,” she corrects cheerfully.

“Root.”

She nods.

“That’s a dumb nickname,” Shaw mutters. “So? What are you doing?”

Root shrugs. “We only have eight weeks to plan this thing.”

“And? It can wait. I have _class_ right now.”

“I figured,” Root says, pointedly looking at Shaw’s carefully set out notebook and pens, and the rest of the classroom.

Shaw’s scowl further deepens – _impressive_ , Root thinks.

Root tosses her hair over her shoulder and leans closer. “I just thought we should get to know each other a little better,” she smiles.

To her credit, Shaw doesn’t lean away, but stays rigidly stock still in her seat, following Root with her eyes. “That’s not necessary,” she says through clenched teeth.

Sitting back, Root folds her hands on the desk. “I think it is,” she disagrees pleasantly, rewarded with another eyeroll and a wordless shake of the head.

“So,” she continues, “Sam, tell me more about yourself.”

“No?” Root grins when Shaw stays silent. “Okay, let me guess. You were in biomedical sciences and on the perfect premed track with a straight 4.33 for, oh, three terms, and then one day you got called into Harold’s office and he managed to convince you to transfer into biomedical engineering. How am I doing?”

The only sign she’s beginning to land some hits are in Shaw’s slightly widened eyes, but she remains resolute in pretending to ignore Root’s presence.

“But since it was right in the middle of your second year, and you didn’t want to waste any time or look indecisive on your transcript, you originally refused. Then Harold does what he does, which is lecture and pontificate and blather on and on about how engineering teaches you problem-solving and discipline, and med schools eat that sort of thing right up. So you finally caved on the condition that as far as anyone would know, you were in engineering the entire time.”

Root wheezes a bit when Shaw quickly – like _lightning_ – grabs her by the collar and pulls her down aggressively. “Who the hell _are_ you?” she hisses.

Root smiles down at her, noting how closely mingled their breaths are. “See? I knew you’d agree that we should get to know each other.”

After another few seconds, Shaw roughly lets Root go, then furtively looks over her shoulder to see if any of the other students are paying attention to them. “Looks like you already know plenty about me.”

“But you don’t know anything about me,” Root says lightly.

Shaw eyes her for a moment, then relaxes her posture. Crossing her arms, she slouches into her chair. “Alright, go ahead, since it looks like you’re just dying to tell me all about yourself.”

“Oh, no,” Root laughs. “You’re right. You’re just going to have to learn more about me as we work together.”

Her eyes narrow, but before Shaw gets a chance to say anything, the instructor walks in and turns the projection system on.

“Okay, let’s get started. This is BME808/COE808 Computations in Genetic Engineering, a 4th year professional elective for computer and biomedical engineering students. I’m Daniel Casey, and I just need to let you all know that unless you took BME501 Bioinformatics last year, you’re going to feel lost in this course. It should’ve been a prerequisite for computer engineering students too, but the departmental…”

Shaw leans over to Root one last time and whispers under her breath, keeping an eye on the lecturer. “Don’t tell me…”

Root nods.

A faint hint of consternation, mixed with something else, crosses Shaw’s face, as she studies Root’s amused expression. She shakes her head and turns back to the lecture.

“Why doesn’t it surprise me that you’re taking your 4th year professional electives already?” Root whispers back, but not quietly.

“Hey,” Casey says, singling Root out. “What’s that?”

She can feel Shaw inching away slightly as if to distance them, and she smiles sweetly up at him. He blinks, and she smiles a little bigger at him, doing her best to turn all her charm on. “Sorry, professor. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

He blinks again at her, then looks down at his notes and shuffles them, trying to find his place. “Uh… um, as I was saying, this course requires a preliminary working knowledge of Perl, but if…”

Root can practically feel the indifferent disapproval radiating off of Shaw as she determinedly fixes her attention on Casey, so Root comes up from the back to bring her mouth up against Shaw’s ear, enjoying the way Shaw tries not to jump when Root’s warm breath tickles her ear. “We’re going to have such a fun time together this term, Sameen.”


	2. T-minus 7 weeks

Root <[root@ift.edu](mailto:root@ift.edu)> (1 day ago)  
to Sameen

Hey hon. Where are you going to be at 12pm tomorrow?

 

Root <[root@ift.edu](mailto:root@ift.edu)> (29 minutes ago)  
to Sameen

Never mind! I know where you’ll be. See you soon ;)

 

Root <[root@ift.edu](mailto:root@ift.edu)> (7 minutes ago)  
to Sameen

Sameen! Have you been filtering my emails out of your inbox??

 

Sameen Shaw <[sameen.shaw@ift.edu](mailto:sameen.shaw@ift.edu)> (0 minutes ago)  
to Root

Yes.

 

Shaw catches herself smirking as she considers the brand new label in her inbox (“Eeyore”) before quickly closing her laptop and stuffing it in her bag. With a furtive glance over her shoulder – lately she can’t help but feel like she’s being _watched_ – she kicks the chair out of her way and clambers out of the crowded study lounge. Belatedly, she wonders how Root knew her emails were getting filtered.

Her phone chirps in her pocket, alerting her to yet another new email. Closing her fingers around her phone, she can feel the muscles in her jaw working as she irritably considers what could have happened if she _had_ given that weirdo her number.

38 emails in the past week alone. _38_.

And all with different subject lines, too, so up until yesterday her inbox just said “Root” everywhere she looked, with bonus winky faces and other dumb emoticons.

It occurs to Shaw that Root couldn’t be any more annoying if she tried, which… is probably the point, she thinks darkly.

She lets go of her phone as she approaches her favourite cafe and rummages in her pocket for the change she’d set aside this morning. She hadn’t expected to need to come here today – she figured she could at least make it till _after_ her meeting with Root tomorrow, but the stress eating urge drives her straight into the cafe.

“Hey, champ,” she says. “Looking like a ladykiller today.”

Fusco looks down at his apron and the evidence of egg explosions all over his pants. “Funny,” he says. “You’re a real riot, Shaw.”

She smirks. “I try.”

He wipes his hands on a towel and walks up to meet her at the register. “So what’ll it be? I got a fresh batch of honey crullers, you’ll love ’em.”

Shaw shakes her head. “It’s serious today, Lionel. I need all the Buffalo Crunches you have.” The wary look on his face alarms her. “Lionel? You still have some, right? You always have some. Nobody ever buys those ridiculous things but me.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Shaw,” he scowls. “Some chick was just here a few minutes ago and bought the last one. People _like_ my stuff, Shaw. This bakery ain’t your private caterer.”

She scowls back even harder at him. “In all the years I’ve been coming here—”

“So, three.”

“—I have _never_ seen anyone come in and buy your weird chicken wing donuts, except for me.”

He shrugs. “I didn’t keep it on the menu board just for you, kid.”

Shaw shakes her head. An unfamiliar emotion is creeping up – _is this what panic feels like_? she wonders – and her donut craving is getting worse.

“Fine. Give me the boring honey crullers. And give me an extra one, too. For the inconvenience or whatever,” she says, waving her hand impatiently.

“Nice try.”

“Lionel,” she says, raising her eyebrows. She briefly wonders if she should try to make him feel sorry for her, then immediately dismisses the idea. Delving into the new terror in her life that is this project with Root would be a pointless waste of time that she could be spending by eating anything she can get her hands on. “It’s _serious_ today.”

“Alright, alright,” Fusco says as he slips an extra cruller into the box. “Come back tomorrow, alright?”

“Let’s hope I don’t need to come here tomorrow,” Shaw mutters darkly. “God, I really hope I don’t need to.”

“Gee, thanks,” Fusco calls after her as she leaves. “See if I let you talk me into giving you any more free donuts.”

She waves without turning back around, already reaching into the box.

Her phone chirps again.

With a sigh, she stuffs the entire donut in her mouth and opens up her email.

 

Root <[root@ift.edu](mailto:root@ift.edu)> (1 minute ago)  
to Sameen

Say cheese!

 

Shaw stares at it for a second, brow furrowed.

“Why is she so goddamned _weird_?” she mumbles around her full mouth.

The sound of a phone camera stops her in her tracks. Turning slowly in the direction of the simulated shutter sound, her eyes travel across the ground to find leather boots pointed straight at her. Following the all-black ensemble all the way up long legs and wavy brown curls, she’s tempted to grab the phone and wipe Root’s smile off her face.

“Hi, Sam. Oh, you’re so photogenic,” Root says.

Shaw shakes her head and shoulders past Root none too gently. First the hostile takeover of her email inbox, and now she can’t even enjoy her donuts in peace anymore?

Root’s fairly skipping along behind her.

“We don’t need to meet with Reese until tomorrow to get up to speed on last year’s competition, you know,” Shaw finally says.

“Oh, I know,” Root says cheerfully. Shaw resents that Root’s long legs allow her to keep up with the extremely brisk pace. “I was just in the area, and I figured you’d be, too.”

“Are you stalking me?”

Shaw looks sharply over at Root when she doesn’t reply. She falters for a second when she meets Root’s gaze head-on, noting the smile that’s almost… patronizing? She forces herself to look away and into her box of donuts.

Root shrugs eventually. “I’ve read a lot of files,” she says lightly. “I’ve gotta say, yours was pretty impressive, Sam. I’m kind of a fan.”

“Where— You know what? Never mind. And by the way, I could do without the paparazzi act.”

Ignoring her, Root abruptly changes the topic and reaches over to tap Shaw’s donut box. “Oh, I love that café. It’s got the most adorable baker, in a scruffy and gruff kind of way.”

Shaw pulls the box closer to herself protectively. She wouldn’t put it past Root to just help herself to someone else’s food. She stuffs another donut in her mouth before Root even gets the chance to try, and contemplates whether or not she could convince Lionel to move to a different café, because now Root might be about to ruin that too.

“I wish I could say this has been nice. See ya, Root.”

“See you tomorrow, Sameen! I’m looking forward to spending more time with you!” Root nearly hollers as Shaw stomps away. She waves sunnily when Shaw turns around to glare at her in embarrassment, avoiding the curious stares of passersby.

Checking her watch, Root debates over whether or not she ought to go to her next class. Feeling inexplicably good-natured, she decides she could go spend some time with her peers today. Catch up with them, see how their lives were going, put some faces to names from transcript files.

Root wanders into the classroom from the back door after class has already started, choosing a seat at the back where she can get a good view of everyone else. Her gaze roves over her classmates, none of whom are recognizable to her in the slightest.

 _Go to class more often_ , she types out in her memo pad.

She watches the lecturer review some basic Laplace transform properties. Daizo’s a cheerful little guy, looking entirely too young to be a full-fledged professor. Resting her chin on her hand, she listens to him explain the difference between functions of time and functions of complex frequency.

 _For people-watching, not the lecture content_ , she adds to her notes. She absentmindedly wonders if this is what class is like, with all the time being used up to review concepts that should’ve been solidified the year before.

Her eyes land on a familiarly small frame sitting dead center at the front of the room. Straightening just the slightest in her seat, Root studies Shaw’s side profile bemusedly, before pulling up her class schedule.

 _Go to the right class_ , she writes with a rueful smile.

She closes her laptop and tucks her chin on top of both hands, still studying Shaw, who’s got a concentrated scowl on her face as she copies down what Daizo’s writing on the board. Once or twice she sees him consider asking Shaw to answer a question, but then think better of it when her eyes meet his dead-on.

Root smiles, feeling vaguely charmed by the consistency of Shaw’s surliness.

She spends the next few minutes of the lecture observing the wide berth the rest of Shaw’s classmates give her, amused by the semi-circle of empty seats surrounding Shaw’s seat. Idly twisting her hair, Root wonders if there are any interesting documented incidents between Shaw and her classmates. She’d bet anything that incidents have occurred, but she doesn’t remember seeing anything particularly shocking written in Shaw’s file. 

Then again, she grins to herself, she'd consider soldering an incompetent lab partner’s entire resistor kit together to be an appropriate method of preventing them from ruining her circuits, too. Waving it around as a threat, now that was a little too obvious for her tastes, but Root appreciates Shaw's apparent ease with handling soldering irons.

Before she gets a chance to open her laptop to go hunting for Shaw’s file again – which would be a project that could take quite a while, now that Harold’s onto her – she feels several eyes on her.

“In the back?” Daizo repeats encouragingly.

Root smiles at the back of Shaw’s head, noting the single-minded focus on the board in front, and shrugs. “Sure,” she says to Daizo, then makes her way down to the front of the class and accepts a whiteboard marker.

She taps the whiteboard marker against her nose a few times, pretending to try to puzzle out the Laplace transform of _sin2t_ , and can’t help beaming at Shaw’s disgruntled expression when she recognizes Root. She brings her hand up to her chin in an attempt to look thoughtful while hiding her sheer delight. She tries to remember what a serious thinking face looks like, and feels like she's semi-succeeding in bringing a stern half-frown to her face.

“It’s a difficult one,” Daizo is saying to the class. “The trick is in remembering the differentiation property.”

He turns around, and blinks as Root finishes up with the solution and clicks the cap on the whiteboard marker.

“Oh,” he says. “Uh… good job!”

Root winks at him, pressing the marker into his hand. “Thanks, Daizo,” she says sweetly.

He stares at her. “Uh, wow. Um, your name is?”

Root wrinkles her nose playfully at him and doesn't answer. When she turns around, she's greeted with an almost exasperated expression as Shaw watches Daizo fumbling to remember where he was in his lesson plan.

She walks past Shaw at the front and whispers, “Don’t worry, me being here was a total accident.”

Shaw’s disbelieving snort stays with Root as she returns to the back of the class. 

Root wonders why she even bothered to try to say something vaguely reassuring at all, especially since she’s been having quite a lot of fun in toying with Shaw so far.

It bothers her for the rest of the class, and she quickly leaves the room when the class is dismissed without a second glance at Shaw up at the front.


	3. T-minus 6 weeks

**_How well can you work under pressure and meet deadlines?_ **

_I hate procrastinating if that means anything. And I work best under pressure. There is more work done under pressure if you know what I mean. ;)_

 

* * *

 

 

Shaw sighs loudly as she puts her phone away. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear Root had written that last committee application response. It had the same lack of subtlety she was starting to recognize as characteristic of every single damn thing Root said.

She’s still shaking her head as she pushes the door open to Fusco’s café.

“Ouch, rough day, huh?” Fusco asks as soon as he sees her face.

She doesn’t bother responding, just waves her hand feebly at the display case as she takes out her wallet.

“Uh… funny thing,” Fusco says uncomfortably, shuffling quickly behind the cash register as though he’s worried Shaw might lunge across the counter at him.

“Someone just got the last Buffalo Crunch. You missed her by two minutes.”

“What?”

“Same chick from last time, too. Can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something a bit nutty about her.”

Shaw rubs at her forehead forcefully, pushing her hair back out of her face. She can’t go deal with Root on an empty stomach.

“Maybe it’s because she actually likes your donuts.”

“You know you’re insulting yourself, too?”

Shaw jabs a finger at the display case, in no mood to put up with him today. Not when she had to go meet Root in less than ten minutes. “Just give me whatever else you have, Lionel. And quickly, before I decide to frequent a different donut shop.”

“Good riddance,” he grouses, but adds an extra powdered donut into the box.

“You know,” Shaw says as she grabs the box out of his hand. “Maybe you should start being better prepared for the demand for your donuts.”

“Why bother? Nobody else buys the weird things, remember?” Fusco snarks at her.

Despite herself, a disgruntled smile pulls at the corners of Shaw’s mouth. His stock has been excessively disappointing recently, but she has a soft spot for the ornery little baker. “Don’t worry, Lionel. You’re one of a kind, I’d never leave you.”

“There you go, being mean to me again.”

“Bye,” Shaw says cheerfully, taking a healthy bite out of a donut as she exits the café. Her chewing slows and then stops when she spots a familiar figure waving coyly at her from the side of the path.

“Are you kidding me?” she mutters. Annoyed, she stuffs the rest of the donut in her mouth (she’s still not sure where Root falls on the food-thief scale, but she’s willing to bet it’d be somewhere near the justifiable-violence end) and brushes the powder from fingers against her pant leg.

“Hey, Sam. How are you?” Root grins. She doesn’t appear bothered by Shaw’s lack of response, and falls into step alongside her. “I’m so glad I found you, I was afraid I’d get lost trying to find the library study room we booked for the interviews.”

“That’s a shame,” Shaw mutters, but she can tell Root heard her, if the quirk in her lips is any indicator.

She freezes when she feels Root’s hand gently land on her upper arm. Before she can object, Root’s thumb is quickly brushing powder from the donut off the side of her mouth, almost tenderly.

She huffs and stares at Root, who tilts her head and just looks down at Shaw, waiting. Shaw peers up at Root from under her furrowed eyebrows, trying to decipher the curious smirk on Root’s face. She can’t help but feel like Root’s waiting for her to do something, so she chooses not to say anything and just turns away and quickens her pace.

They walk – well, Shaw speedwalks furiously, while Root seems to be able to keep up with her without getting out of breath – in silence until they reach the library, which is of course when Root decides to start up with her inane chatter again.

“Have you seen some of the responses we got for the applications?”

Shaw doesn’t see anyone glaring at them from the cubicles for disrupting the quiet of the library, but she shoots a dark look at Root and hisses, “Shh,” anyway.

She continues looking around for signs to try to find their room. In retrospect, she probably should’ve expected that Root’s first instinct would be to immediately step closer to Shaw and repeat her question, only this time with her mouth unnecessarily close to Shaw’s ear and a lock of her hair falling against Shaw’s shoulder.

Stiffly, Shaw turns her head towards Root. Their faces are now far too close to be appropriate in a staid library setting, but Shaw’s finally catching onto Root’s game, and she’ll be damned if she lets Root keep needling at her to get a reaction. She stares impassively up at Root, pleased to see a slight widening in the eyes as Root takes an involuntary half-step back.

“People are idiots,” Shaw answers shortly, unable to stop the beginnings of a small smirk from appearing. With no little satisfaction, she feels like she just won this round.

She strides off in the direction of their room, leaving Root behind to stare after her for a heartbeat, so she doesn’t see the delight spread across Root’s face before hurrying to catch up.

“I couldn’t agree more. Did you see the one guy who wrote like 20 words for his entire application?”

She doesn’t notice that Root’s gotten a hold of her box of donuts until it’s too late, when she turns around and watches Root take a bite out of one of her last jelly donuts, horrified. She snatches the box back and snaps, “These are mine!”

Root wipes jelly from the corner of her mouth, locking eyes with Shaw as she licks at her finger slowly. “There’s plenty to share, Sameen,” Root says, before holding what’s left of her donut up in front of Shaw’s mouth.

The unsettling feeling filling Shaw is new and strange, as is the fearfully astounded look she’s aware she’s giving Root right now.

Cradling her box in the arm farthest from Root, and trying to decide whether she wants the rest of the donut more than she wants to eat something Root’s mouth has already been on, Shaw meets Root’s amused gaze with a hostile stare.

Finally deciding to just consider the donut as a lost extra from Lionel that she didn’t _technically_ miss out on, Shaw settles into the most comfortable chair in the small, cramped study room, pettily refusing to pull her chair in to let Root get by. Belatedly, she feels Root pressing up against her back for a moment just slightly longer than necessary as she squeezes through, and scowls.

Shaw pulls up the response form on her laptop and points at one entry, angling her screen so that the food thief can read it.

“Did you write this one? Be honest.”

 

**_What measures will you take to ensure the competition runs smoothly?_ **

_I am 100% sure it will run smoothly, I am a smooth operator._

 

A small snort of laughter escapes Root as she peers at the screen, catching both of them off guard.

Shaw hadn’t expected Root’s laughter to sound so… normal. It didn’t jive at all with Root’s whole unflappably taunting demeanour.

Not that Shaw had been expecting a cackle, despite feeling positive that one of her non-REM nightmares has probably featured a witchy version of Root, but she can tell the brief laughter caught Root by surprise as well.

Root clears her throat, looking mildly uncomfortable. “I’m starting to get concerned about the caliber of applicants we’ve had so far.”

Shaw makes a point of looking back at her screen, skimming through the short answer question responses. “Nobody ever said engineering students were good at writing.”

“Well…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. _I’m_ good at writing. But I guess we’ll see what they’re like during the interviews soon.”

“Right,” Root echoes.

The conversation dies as they both focus on their respective screens and let the silence settle uncomfortably over them.

 

* * *

 

  

_Tap tap tap._

Root looks over at Shaw in amusement. She doesn’t think Shaw even realizes she’s doing it.

_Tap tap tap tap tap tap._

“Bored?” she finally asks.

Shaw stops flicking her pen against the table as she looks up at Root.

“Huh?”

“Are we bored?” Root repeats, leaning back in her chair and stretching. She notes Shaw’s gaze drop down to her chest before coming back up so quickly, she’s not sure if she actually saw it.

Eyes narrowing as she processes the “we,” Shaw shrugs. “I guess if there’s anything I’ve learned today, it’s that engineers aren’t always prompt. And the ones who are turn out to be the best ones for the job.”

Root grins at that a little. “So I’m guessing one, punctuality is important to you, and two, you already have an idea of who you like for the committee?”

“One, yes, I don’t trust people who aren’t on time. And two, yeah, pretty much, don’t you?”

 _Be on time, or late, as needed_ , gets added to Root’s memo pad.

“Hmm?” she says absently. “Oh, yes, I suppose this is a good point to review who we’ve seen so far. I don’t think our last applicant is going to show up to his interview.”

“Great,” Shaw says, checking her watch. “We have an hour and a half left in here, so let’s wrap this up, and then…”

Root chews on the end of her pen as she studies the stray tendril of hair that’s been falling over Shaw’s face for the past few minutes. She leans over and tucks it behind Shaw’s ear.

“Then we can make the most of this private room?” she suggests with a slight waggle of her eyebrows.

Shaw doesn’t even bother responding, just leans away, rolls her eyes and reviews her applicant notes.

“I mean, it’d be a shame to let this room go to waste…” Root continues, prodding a little.

Shaw shakes her head almost imperceptibly, still focused on her notes.

Root grins. Shaw’s starting to develop a strategy for dealing with her, and is clearly building up her embarrassment tolerance, so she figures now would be a good time to switch it up on her end.

“After all,” she finishes, abruptly businesslike, “This is one of the only places on campus where you can actually get wi-fi when you’re trying to study.”

Shaw looks up at her, suspicious at the switch to a brisk tone.

Root meets her gaze, schooling her features into a professionally detached, friendly-but-not-overly-so expression.

Shaw tucks her chin in a bit, still eyeing Root warily, before nodding. “Right.”

“Great. So as far as VP Competitions goes, I feel like we can split the two portions of the job into two positions, since I’m not fully confident that one person can design the challenges in addition to securing judges. What do you think?”

Shaw blinks, completely at a loss for how to respond. “Uh… what?”

 _AHA_ , Root writes in her memo pad, careful not to let anything slip on her face.

“Well, I really liked Jason Greenfield, the 4th year electrical. I think he could pull off designing all seven categories, and I want to work with him on those, but his people skills… may leave something to be desired.”

Shaw shuffles through her papers before finding Greenfield’s application. “Oh, I remember him. Yeah, I liked him for VP Competitions too, but I thought Carter would’ve been a better fit since she has judge contacts too.”

Root shrugs. “I do too. I think between us and the committee, we could all handle getting judges. We only need 22 of them.”

“Right,” Shaw says slowly. “But I think Carter should definitely have a spot on the committee in some capacity, and if not VP Competitions, then where?”

Root pulls up Joss Carter’s file on her laptop, studying her picture contemplatively. “Are you and Carter friends?”

“Yeah, so?” Shaw says, a little defensively.

“No, that’s great,” Root smiles reassuringly. “I think we’ll be working pretty closely with VP Logistics, so it’d be nice to get someone we get along with. What do you think?”

“Carter as VP Logistics,” Shaw muses. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“Great,” Root makes a note of their decisions so far. “So that leaves VP Communications and VP Finance.”

“I liked Zoe for Finance.”

Root nods. “Nobody else applied for that anyway.”

She clocks Shaw’s satisfied smile, and pulls up Zoe Morgan’s file as well. Studying their pictures along with Shaw’s now somewhat pleased face sitting across from her, Root nods thoughtfully.

 _Have an attractive friend circle?_ , she types in her memo notes.

“I didn’t like anyone for VP Communications,” Shaw says after a moment, a little crossly.

“Same. We can table that for now if you’d like?”

“I don’t want to have to come back and keep talking to y—” Shaw cuts herself off. “I mean, uh, I’d rather get this all sorted out now before our first meeting next week.” She scratches at her neck uncomfortably.

Root smiles, taken with the socially awkward blunder. “Good idea. How about this, why don’t we just split the duties for VP Communications between us? It’s not incredibly difficult, and if we find another volunteer later who can step into the position, that’ll be great, but otherwise I think we can handle it.”

She can tell Shaw’s almost bursting with suspicion and confusion at her unusually professional behaviour. Root leans back in her chair contentedly, pleased with her progress today.

Shaw finally nods in agreement. “You’re right. Heck, even Finch’s pet dog could probably do the VP Communications job.”

“Harold has a dog?” Root asks, intrigued. She didn’t figure Finch to be the dog owner type, much less that Shaw would know that much about his life. She wonders again exactly how Finch came about recruiting Shaw to biomedical engineering in the first place.

From the alarmingly soft smile on Shaw’s face, Root almost suspects it had something to do with the dog, but… it can’t be that simple, can it? Root watches Shaw’s face as she starts telling her all about Finch’s Dutch dog, and is torn between laughing out loud at Shaw’s simple affection for a dog named Bear, and shaking her head in bemusement at this development.

She chooses instead to nod politely and listen.

Shaw eventually realizes she just spent the past few minutes talking about a dog that wasn’t hers, to _Root_ , of all people, and falls silent.

Root toys with the idea of adding _Get a dog friend instead of human friends_ to her memos, but pulls out her textbook instead to join Shaw in studying.

For the first time, the silence that falls between them is companionable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact those are real application responses i've received before
> 
> also i posted this from my phone and i'm feeling really proud about it. also frustrated. but proud


	4. T-minus 5 weeks

Root’s attention is diverted from the lab report she’s writing in advance for one of her classes when she hears a faint sound outside her bedroom. Turning her head and waiting to see if that was really the sound of her doorbell ringing, or just something she imagined, she frowns slightly.

The doorbell rings again.

Getting up slowly from her bed, she pulls on her bathrobe and warily approaches her front door. For as long as she’s been living here, her doorbell has only rung twice, and only for deliveries that her landlord had “helpfully” brought up to her to see if she was still alive.

But she hasn’t ordered anything recently and her rent is always paid at least four months in advance, so she carefully puts her eye up to the peephole. As she does, the vague memory of all the times Hanna used to shout “Something’s going to get you in the eye!” at the screen whenever a character looked through the peephole, even in Disney movies, flickers through her mind.

She gapes a little at the familiarly resentful face, then fumbles in her sudden rush to quickly open the door. Root takes a quick look at her watch: 10:14 p.m.

“Well,” she says, gripping her bathrobe a little tighter, “This is a surprise.”

Shaw’s not even looking at Root, because her eyes are quickly cataloguing everything in the apartment behind her.

Instinctively, Root steps outside and crowds Shaw’s space, semi-closing the door behind her.

“What can I do for you?” she adds, pleased to see Shaw take an abrupt step back.

Shaw glances down at the bare legs poking out of Root’s fairly sheer bathrobe, then looks back up at Root with an indifferent look on her face. “You left this in class today.”

Root’s genuinely taken aback as she takes her wallet back from Shaw’s outstretched hand. She could have sworn she didn’t have any reason to be taking it out of her bag at all today, much less leaving it behind in class. “Oh. Thank you,” she says belatedly.

With a bored shrug, Shaw nonchalantly leans almost imperceptibly to the right to peer around Root’s shoulder.

Chewing on her lip for a second, Root debates internally for half a second, before leaning against the doorjamb and gently nudging the door open with her foot. She’s tempted to smile when she sees Shaw studiously observing what would appear to be, for all intents and purposes, a perfectly normal apartment.

“Would you like to come in?” Root asks in a carefully modulated, polite voice, trying her best not to convey any hint of subtext.

She watches Shaw’s nose twitch, not unlike a cat on the brink of being easily spooked. Patiently, Root crosses one leg behind the other, noting the way Shaw’s eyes briefly dip down.

“Okay,” Shaw finally says. She awkwardly follows Root in, making no secret of the fact that she’s looking at everything in the apartment, from the high ceilings to the clean, modern furniture. She lingers briefly in front of a particularly avant-garde painting of what looks like two little pink people in the car from the Life board game.

Root quietly lets Shaw wander around her apartment curiously, pulling out two wineglasses and uncorking the red she’s been working on for the past two days. She looks up to see Shaw pausing in front of her bookcase, hand reaching out to pick up a framed photograph of Root and Hanna.

“Shiraz?” she quickly asks, at Shaw’s side in a flash.

Shaw’s hand drops from its path to the bookcase, and she glances at the proffered wine with a raised eyebrow. “Fancy,” is her only comment as she accepts.

They settle into her living room, with Shaw immediately slouching into Root’s favourite chaise as Root perches on the edge of the closest couch. Root’s content to let the awkwardness stretch as they make strained small talk about the competition, reveling in the undercurrent of tension that for once, she isn’t contributing to. On occasion, she notices Shaw surreptitiously eyeing the photo on her bookcase, but Root opts to press forward with the stilted, impersonal conversation.

Eventually Shaw sets the wineglass down and looks around once more, but this time it looks like she’s searching for something.

Root raises an eyebrow in question as Shaw’s judgmental, disappointed face turns to face her.

“You got any food around here?”

Root glances at her watch again. “You haven’t had dinner yet?”

She notes the slightly defiant look on Shaw’s face. Smiling, she rises and beckons for Shaw to follow her to the kitchen. “Let’s see what we can rustle up.”

“Great,” Shaw says brightly, the most animated Root has seen her all night, as she settles onto the bar stool at Root’s kitchen island.

Root emerges from the fridge with some crackers and cheese, but clocks Shaw’s slightly dampened expression and decides to substitute the crackers with butter and bread. “Grilled cheese?”

“Perfect,” Shaw says with a genuine smile.

Busying herself with finding plates, Root catches herself thinking about the curious way Shaw seems to be able to light up her entire kitchen with her contentment. When she turns back around, she asks in a purposefully detached voice, “Why don’t we kill two birds with one stone and go over the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting?”

“What?” Shaw asks distractedly, watching the buttered bread sizzle in the pan. “Oh. Yeah, I guess we should get cracking on actual work,” she finally says, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her before.

Root’s affixed a cordial, restrained smile on her own face, as she pops a small piece of cheese in her mouth. “I mean, besides coming to return my wallet, that’s why you’re here, anyway, right?”

“Right.”

 

* * *

 

 

“And I’m saying, we don’t need another engineering-related judge, we should be reaching out to other faculties for some of these categories,” Shaw says heatedly.

“But Casey’s one of the most brilliant computer science professors in the state, and Root said she’d be able to get him to jump at the chance to judge the programming competition. Who else are we going to be approaching for that category, sociology profs?” Jason argues back, gesturing at Root, who’s been bored and having a staring contest with the dog in the corner for the past few minutes while the two of them have been squabbling.

Opening her mouth to tell him exactly what she thinks of Root and her ability to manage to get any of these instructors to “jump” at any suggestions, Shaw’s cut off when Zoe holds up her hands in a peacemaking gesture. “Do we really need to be securing judges yet? Let’s just note down that Root has, uh, connections, and then we can come back to this.”

“Yeah,” Carter says reasonably, “We have a whole bunch of tasks we need to be assigning, right?”

Root finally stops trying to stare down the dog, and touches Greenfield’s arm lightly. “We can talk about this while we design the challenges later this week if you want, Jason.”

Eyes narrowed, Shaw doesn’t miss the way Root’s managed to get Greenfield on her side already, if the instantly appeased look on his face is anything to go by. “Hang on a second, category designs should be something we all weigh in on.”

“Actually,” Carter cuts in. “I’m in civil, how am I really going to be able to be able to contribute to programming or senior design? Plus I need to start getting food sponsors.”

Zoe nods. “And I should be deciphering last year’s budget so that we have an idea of the materials we can afford.”

And apparently Shaw can’t even count on those two to have her back. She makes a mental note not to clean the heels she borrowed from Zoe and somehow managed to stain with what looks suspiciously like either blood or mud. Bear wanders under the table towards her, and she can feel her stress slowly falling away as she pets him.

“Fine,” Jason accedes. “Plus we need to get a move on finding VP Communications, too, right? And then they can help us with contacting judges.”

“Well, Sam here would probably vote for Bear for VP Comms,” Root smirks, pointing out the affection Shaw’s showering on Bear right now.

Shaw pulls another face at Bear unabashedly, before turning back to the table and scowling at everyone else, because she still hates all of them. “He could probably do a better job than any of you anyway. Right, Bear?”

Bear pants in agreement.

“That’s right,” Shaw says seriously, still talking to the dog.

Zoe and Carter exchange an amused look, while Greenfield looks to Root as if to ask, “What’s happening here?” but Root’s got an odd expression on her face that Shaw just manages to catch before it disappears when she comes back up.

“Alright, let’s wrap this up,” Shaw decides. “Carter, you look into food sponsors and finding a venue for the awards ceremony. Greenfield, I want your ideas on how you’re going to incorporate programming into as many challenges as possible, since Finch told me that’s what they’ll be focusing on at State this year. Zoe—”

“Zoe, can you look into booking a venue instead, and get us a quote? That way Carter and I can work on promotional content and getting the website up,” Root interrupts.

Annoyed, Shaw says, “Venue booking is a logistics thing, not finance. Zoe needs to focus on getting us a comprehensive preliminary budget by the end of the week.”

“And I’ll be working with her on that if she needs help,” Root says, eyebrows raised at Shaw's return to a hostile tone.

“Look, Root,” Shaw says, leaning forward. She’s not surprised when Root leans forward to match her aggressive posture. “Your strength is that you’re a computer geek, so you can work with Greenfield on competition design this week and bring back whatever you’ve got to our next meeting for us to look over.”

“You think I’m just here to be tech support?” Root asks, voice still vaguely cordial, but the look in her eyes sends a quick chill through Shaw.

She can see the other three shifting uncomfortably in their seats, but that spurs her reply even more emphatically. “Good, you catch on quick.”

Root leans forward even further, causing the other three to furtively lean back as if to give her and Shaw more space. “Listen, Shaw. I’m your co-Chair. We can have our separate tasks, but we’re equals on this. You don’t have to like me, but we’re going to be working together on this, so let’s keep it civil.”

Root’s voice is firm, but somehow she still manages to sound vaguely patronizing, and Shaw’s knuckles whiten. This is the first time she’s able to recognize the way she’s felt about Root since the moment they met. If it wasn’t for the long table separating them, Shaw’s sure she’d be attempting to throttle Root right now. Whatever pleasure she feels in finally identifying exactly what it is that she'd like to do to Root is chased away by the growing urge to disregard the table in the way right now.

Shaw looks down with a start when Bear’s cold nose presses against her leg, then pauses to collect her thoughts for a moment. She resettles herself into her chair. With a measured exhalation, Shaw nods. “Fine.”

The table collectively sighs, but before even a beat has passed, Shaw adds, “But we won’t be working together for long, Root. And then you better hope it stays civil.”

Greenfield leans over and whispers to Carter, “That was… a threat, right?”

Carter barely nods, watching Shaw with a half-exasperated and half-alarmed look on her face. “Sure sounded like it.”

A light tap on the door deflates some of the tension at the table as Reese enters with a quiet, “I hope I’m not… interrupting,” as he sees the way Root and Shaw are still glaring at each other from opposite ends of the table while the other three sit as unobtrusively as possible in their chairs.

“Um, nope,” Greenfield says as he hurriedly packs his things into his bag. “I think we’re done, anyway.”

“Well, this was… interesting,” Zoe says. “I'll leave you two to it, then. Hello, John.”

Reese watches Zoe sashay past him out of the corner of his eye as he nods stiffly.

“See y’all next week,” Carter says as she stands as well. “If y’all don’t kill each other first,” she adds under her breath as she claps Reese on the back on her way out.

He acknowledges her with another stiff nod, then bends to say hello to Bear.

Root’s already got her things packed as well, and she brushes past him without a word.

Reese looks at Shaw, eyebrows raised. “I take it you had a busy meeting.”

She sinks into her chair. “That’s one way to put it.” Lazily, she beckons for him to send Bear over to her.

He acquiesces and watches her coax Bear into putting both his paws up on her knees, settling into the chair next to them.

“Want to tell me all about it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Finch says you have to.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” Shaw says sarcastically.

Reese waits.

“Fine. But I’m keeping Bear tonight.”

Reese continues waiting.

She rolls her eyes. “Fine, I’ll take him back to Harold tonight.”

Reese leans back in his chair, satisfied. “So, how was your meeting?”

“Where do I start,” Shaw mutters darkly, thinking about how everything she thinks she understands about Root’s personality seems to constantly be in flux. One second she’s a perky psycho, the next she’s withdrawn and professional.

And her examination of Root’s wallet, which she _may_ have lifted from Root’s bag in class, didn’t yield any useful information, aside from the fact that Root appears to be obscenely wealthy. Who carries around $170 in cash and then doesn’t even notice when their wallet goes missing for the better part of a day?

Seeing Reese’s patient expression, she sighs heavily as she considers how much she ought to tell him.

“Start from the beginning,” he suggests.

“Got an hour?”

Shaw’s only half kidding.

 

* * *

 

 

“Oh, it’s you,” Fusco says unenthusiastically.

“Now, Lionel, is that any way to greet a paying customer?” Root’s glad she came to the café. It feels like it’s been ages since she got to taunt someone, and she’s nearly ready to burst at how indescribably unsettling her back-and-forth with Shaw is starting to feel.

“What’ll it be?” he asks reluctantly.

“Same as last time,” she smiles.

“Yeah? And what name do I write on the cup this time, Caroline? Or Veronica?”

Root smiles sweetly. “Whatever you’d like, Lionel.”

“How about Cocoa Puffs,” Fusco suggests, already writing it on the cup.

Root’s smile grows. “And throw in that donut from last time, too.”

“Ah, say,” Fusco says, checking the display case. “You sure you don’t want to try anything else?”

Tilting her head, she asks, “Why, what’s up, Lionel?”

The bell rings as another customer enters the café.

“What’s up?” he mutters. “What’s up is that you learned my name somehow without me telling you, and that you keep making me tell a tiny little terror that she just missed the last of her favourite donuts, and that you—”

“Wait,” Root says delightedly. “This tiny little terror of yours… about ye high? Perpetually grumpy? Her face says AND but her personality says XOR?”

She hears a mild laugh come from behind, but doesn’t acknowledge the eavesdropping stranger.

“What?” Fusco asks. “Is that a nerd joke? Shaw’s always making unfunny nerd jokes too. Both of you, nerdy pains in my ass.”

He bundles up the donut and rings Root out.

“Did someone say Shaw?” comes a voice behind Root. She turns to see a classically beautiful, if cold-looking, blonde giving them a curious half-smile.

“Martine,” the stranger says, holding out her hand.

With only some hesitation, Root shakes it. “Root. How do you know Shaw?”

With a laugh that doesn’t quite sound genuine, Martine’s arresting eyes sweep up and down Root in a way she can’t help but think resembles a snow leopard lying in wait for its prey. “I’m in her program.”

Root nods slowly. “Well, it was nice to meet you.”

“You too, Root,” Martine says, strangely emphatically, then steps up to the register. With another small laugh, she repeats, “Face says AND but personality says XOR,” to herself.

After some thought, Root pivots from her path out the door and sets her coffee and donut down on a table inside. She reaches into her bag for some paper and a pen, smiling politely as Martine leaves, then beginning to write something on a piece of paper.

“You’re still here?” Fusco asks in dismay when he sees her sitting in his cafe.

“If Shaw comes in today,” Root says, “Do me a favour, Lionel? Give this to her? But don’t tell her anything about me.”

He eyes it as if it’s a grenade. “Whatever nutty game you two are playing, keep me out of it,” he says warily.

“Please, Lionel?” Root asks. “Tell you what, I’ll buy whatever you think is going to go unsold for today. I have,” she checks her wallet, “I have about $150 in cash. Give me all your stale strudels.”

He eyes the money being waved in his face for less than five seconds.

“Alright,” he grumbles, quickly plucking it out of her hand. “You tell her you bribed me and you’re banned for life.”

“Of course,” Root chirps happily.

“She kills me when I give this to her, you’re banned for life. If she doesn’t kill you first.”

“She won’t kill you, Lionel. Or me.”

“Famous last words.”

“Thanks, Lionel. Bye! See you tomorrow,” Root calls over her shoulder, hands full with bags of baked goods.

Fusco sighs heavily, watching her leave. After he's sure she's gone, he peeks into the piece of paper.

_I’m not normally a fan of discrete signals, but I just had to let you know how much I enjoy these samples. Better luck next time, maybe._

“She spelled discreet wrong,” he grumbles as he begins bustling around his café. “And my donuts are huge! Samples, my ass.”


	5. T-minus 2 weeks

Shaw sighs as she looks once more at her phone. Jaw set, she begins dialing.

“Hello?”

“Hey. Uh, what are you doing right now?”

“Why, Sameen,” Root’s voice is coy, “I’m always free for you.”

Shaw huffs, but she’d been expecting this, and had already resolved to ignore whatever Root says, lest Root get an opportunity to make a crack about a booty call or whatever. “Do you have card access to the circuits labs?”

“At school?”

“No, at the beach. Yes, Einstein, at school.”

“Be there in a jiff,” Root says cheerily, before hanging up.

Pressing her hand to her forehead for a second, Shaw wonders if she should have just waited around for another 4th year with card access to just walk by. She glances at her watch. 12:27 a.m. and the engineering building was already deserted. She’s disappointed in her peers. Where’s all the dedication and discipline and lack of a life that people always attributed to engineering students?

Her phone rings. _Awfully soon for Root to be calling back already_ , Shaw thinks warily. The last thing she needs is for Root to change her mind and let her down right now.

“Yeah?”

“Can you let me in?”

Shaw peers out the window down at the front of the building. She can see a figure all dressed in black, waving at her as though she knows where Shaw is.

“How did you—never mind,” Shaw says. “I’m coming down to let you in now.”

She takes one look at her heavy backpack, before leaving it sitting outside the room and jogging down the three flights of stairs to get to the doors. Pushing it open, she ushers Root in as the alarm sounds.

“Great,” Shaw grumbles. “Now security’s going to come in and check up on us.”

“Sounds exciting,” Root smiles down at her, somehow managing to pack a world of innuendo into two words.

Shaw rolls her eyes and makes her way back up to the lab, worried about her bag being stolen. Although, from the looks of it, the building is deserted tonight.

She can hear Root trailing along closely behind her up the stairs, and tries not to think about the fact that Root’s probably watching her climb the stairs with that lopsided, mirthful smirk on her face. The one that is following behind her all too closely, she realizes, as she stops on the third floor to feel Root’s head gently bump against her back. Milliseconds earlier, and Root’s head would have been bumping into her butt.

“Alright, go,” Shaw gestures with a shooing motion at the door as she makes her way back to her bag. “Open it.”

“What’s the magic word, Sam?” Root’s got her student card out, but she’s holding it teasingly just out of the card reader’s detection.

“… Please,” Shaw sighs reluctantly.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Root grins as Shaw’s eyes narrow, before unlocking the door with a quick press against the reader and pushing it open. “After you.”

Shaw walks through the door, brushing disarmingly close against Root’s outstretched arm and torso as she does so. “Okay, thanks. You can go now.”

“And miss all the fun?” Root asks as she lets herself in as well. “I love study dates.”

“This isn’t a…” Shaw stops abruptly, then busies herself pulling her breadboard and circuits kit out of her bag. Resolving not to say a word more than she needs to, she sets about rebuilding the thermistor circuit she’s sure her idiot lab partner put together incorrectly earlier in the day.

Sneaking a peek at what Root’s up to out of the corner of her eye, Shaw’s startled to find herself seemingly alone in the lab. She looks around, hackles up, unwilling to admit that the building is oddly creepy this late at night, in a locked lab.

A loud crash from the partially hidden storage room – the _locked_ partially hidden storage room – in the corner of the lab _doesn’t_ make her jump.

She did _not_ jump at the sudden noise.

Clutching sharp-tipped multimeter leads in each hand anyway, Shaw waits.

Root strolls out of the storage room with far too many circuit boards stacked haphazardly in her arms. Glimpsing Shaw standing there pointing two giant needle-like probes at her, Root freezes, caught off guard. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out for a moment, before a genuine smile seems to unwillingly grow on her face.

Shaw drops the leads back down onto the lab bench. “Jesus, Root. What the hell are you doing?”

Root’s still standing there, circuit boards overflowing from her arms, smiling at her in a way that’s unnerving, if only because Shaw can’t detect any of the usual smugness or mischief in it.

Shaw shifts uncomfortably from one foot to another, unwilling to break eye contact with Root ( _not_ because she’s still jumpy), and Root finally blinks and turns to drop the circuit boards onto the widest bench at the front. When she turns back around, her face is characteristically impish, and she winks at Shaw as she settles onto the stool, poised to get to work. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

Deciding she actually would rather not know what Root’s up to, Shaw returns to her breadboard, chastising herself and doubly resolute about not saying a single word more to Root than she absolutely needs to.

They work in silence for quite some time, before Shaw finally stops and looks at her lab bench in dismay. Scouring the other lab benches, she ends up in front of the cabinet, looking almost plaintively up at the top shelf. Carefully eyeing Root, who’s still bent over whatever she’s doing with her circuit boards, Shaw tries to drag a stool over to the cabinet as quietly as possible.

“Need a hand?” Root’s voice is suddenly in her ear.

Shaw lets go of the stool and turns around, arms crossed. They’re standing unnecessarily close, and Shaw can smell faint hints of newly-lit matches and bourbon and vanilla, and Root’s suddenly leaning closer, and the space separating them is drastically decreasing.

Shaw takes an automatic step back into the cabinet, only to see Root’s arms reaching up to the top shelf to pull down a handful of the alligator clips she was looking for.

Shaw eyes them being held up in the small amount of space left between them, with Root’s other hand still leaning on the top shelf. After a series of heartbeats, Shaw grabs them and pivots under Root’s arm before striding back across the room to her lab bench.

“Thanks,” she adds belatedly, voice just slightly hoarse, to her annoyance.

“Happy to help,” Root says. She sounds the same as she always does, and Shaw’s annoyance grows further. Root’s heels click after her towards the front of the lab, but Shaw keeps her head bowed, busily attaching the alligator clips to the power source, until she can hear Root pass by.

Shaw’s head unwillingly pops back up when Root walks past her one more time and casually drops a granola bar on her lab bench as she carries her circuit boards back into the storage room. She watches Root shrug her jacket on and grasp the door handle, before tossing Shaw an easy smile over her shoulder.

“We’ll do this again soon,” Root says carelessly, as if this had been a _date_ , and a lukewarm one at that. “Get home safe, sweetie. It is nearly 2 a.m., after all.”

Shaw glances at her watch in surprise, too preoccupied to register the time for half a second as she mulls over the sickeningly saccharine term of endearment, then hears the door click at Root exits.

She stares after her for a second, before looking down at the granola bar suspiciously.

Shrugging, she unwraps it and stuffs it into her mouth, before getting back to her work.

 

* * *

 

 

“Sameen,” Root calls across the stage. “Sameen, could you come up here for a second?”

Shaw gets up out of her front row seat in the audience and climbs onstage. “What is it?”

Root leans one side against the podium, pointing at the controls on the screen. “The lights need to be turned back on.”

“And you can’t figure that out yourself?” Shaw asks suspiciously. “Aren’t you supposed to be a techno genius?”

Dimpling at her, Root shrugs. “You flatter me.”

“Well, move then,” Shaw says, trying to get at the controls.

Root acquiesces, but only by the bare minimum, so that Shaw has to squeeze in right up against her to take a look at the menu options. As Shaw shoots her a dark look, Root knows that Shaw knows what she’s up to, but she just watches Shaw’s look of concentration as she stabs at the buttons.

“Maybe try this one,” Root suggests, reaching around Shaw to press the display button.

Feeling Shaw stiffen slightly in her arms, she drops down onto Shaw’s shoulder and grins, knowing the point of her chin is digging in. “Oh, there we go,” Root breathes. She can’t see Shaw’s face from here, but she can just picture the exasperated look on her face.

Shaw presses the lighting button decisively before shoving Root back and picking up the mic. “Alright, that’s the end of the info session. Feel free to come up here if you have any questions, or go over there to register.”

There’s a clamour of people coming down to the stage now, and Root can see Greenfield looking increasingly panicked as people approach him with questions about the challenge content. Making her way over through the crowd to him, she gently grasps his elbow and points him toward the registration table.

“Why don’t you help out over there? I can handle these questions,” she says.

He shoots her a grateful look before fleeing.

Root chats amicably with a few participants and answers their questions to the best of her ability, but the number of participants waiting to ask a question never seems to end. She looks around to find the rest of the committee similarly beset, with Zoe seeming to flourish in diplomacy while Carter looks increasingly fed up with some of the more inane questions. Root cranes her neck a bit to find Shaw smiling at a smarmy-looking guy with his hand on her arm instead of answering questions.

She holds her hand up and walks away from the person asking her a question with a belated, “I’ll be right back,” and makes her way over to Shaw.

“I bet you’d just about melt when properly treated,” the guy’s saying to her, “Just like aluminum-silicon alloys, all you need is some capable, robust strontium modifiers.”

“Oh, and you’re strontium, are you?” Shaw replies, amusement in her voice.

 _Hypereutectic pistons? Really?_ Root thinks, irked. If she’d known all Shaw wanted was about as much subtlety as a… well, as a piston, she’d have tried that weeks ago. Not that she’d been particularly occupied with subtlety to begin with.

“Can I help you?” Root asks sweetly, barging right into their conversation.

“I think I have this covered, Root,” Shaw says, eyeing her.

“Root,” she says, ignoring Shaw, holding her hand out to the guy.

He looks between them, then unenthusiastically shakes Root’s hand. “Tomas.”

“Chemical engineering?” Root asks, addressing Tomas but looking at Shaw. “Just to warn you, chems usually find themselves out of their league. Their scope just tends to be so… limited.”

He arches a brow – an irritatingly well-shaped one, Root thinks unwillingly, along with the rest of his face – and smirks. “Mechanical, actually. And I’m sure I’m well-equipped to bring a more than satisfactory performance.”

There’s no hint of amusement left in Shaw’s expression, as she shoves Root away none too gently. “All disciplines will get a fighting chance at IFTEC, especially if they’re part of an interdisciplinary team,” Shaw says matter-of-factly. “It was very nice meeting you, Tomas. If you ever have any more questions…”

“I’ll be sure to call you right away,” Tomas smarms at her.

Root tugs on Shaw, pointing at the crowd of people she’d abandoned. “We have so many questions to answer, Sameen.”

“Oh, Sameen, is it?” Tomas says, just not getting the hint and going away like he ought to have the minute Root came over to remind Shaw that she had a job to attend to. “It suits you.”

Shaw’s smiling at the rake again. “Thank you,” she says, before allowing herself to be pulled away.

As soon as Tomas ambles off toward the registration table, Shaw whips Root around. “Root, what the hell are you doing?”

Root sniffs. “Keeping it professional. Go on, everyone’s lining up to get a piece of you.”

The glare Shaw’s leveling at her is quickly cut off as social etiquette dictates that Shaw at least pretend to be open to interacting with the multitude of strangers swarming her.

Root steals away to the side of the stage for a second and pulls out her phone.

“Fusco speaking, how can I help you?”

“Hey, Lionel,” Root says. “I think I’ll be dropping by today and buying _all_ your baked goods. Say, half an hour, or so?”

“Wait a minute,” Fusco protests. “Look, I still have a business to run. I don’t know what your problem is with Shaw, but I have other customers who might not come back if I’m always out of things to sell them.”

Root considers that for a second, eyeing Tomas cynically. “Fine. Just the Buffalo Crunches, as usual, then.”

“You’re the boss,” Fusco mutters resentfully. “But I’m starting to get worried for my health here, Banana Nut Crunch. Shaw gets angrier each time, and I think she thinks I’m doing this on purpose.”

“Well, you are,” Root says reasonably. “And getting paid pretty handsomely for it.”

“Yeah, well, I might be needing more to keep up my end of the deal here. She nearly clocked me after she read that last note you left her.”

Root rolls her eyes. “Fine. I’ll wire you $200 tonight.”

“Wait, how do—”

“Does it matter, Lionel?”

A loud sigh comes from the other end. “Fine. It better be in my account tonight.”

There’s a pause, and Root waits.

“Look,” Lionel says hesitantly. “I don’t know what Shaw did to you, but you have no idea how much that chick likes her food. You’re _seriously_ messing with her, here.”

“I know,” Root says absently, watching Shaw paste another fake smile on her face as she talks to the next participant.

“I don’t think you do,” Lionel says. “Alright, I got a customer. My bakery is unofficially out of Buffalo Crunch donuts as long as you hold up your end.”

With that, he hangs up.

Root looks pensively at her phone, then back at Shaw.

She can feel another insuppressible smile sneaking up on her, this time as Shaw seems to be in frantic damage control as an insulted-looking participant stalks away from the stage. They make eye contact as Shaw looks over at her, then mouths fiercely for her to _get your ass over here, Root_.

She goes to join her, hand settling lightly on Shaw’s lower back, presenting a united front as they try to unravel the offended crowd. Root sees Shaw glance down at the arm reaching behind her, but she doesn’t mention it, or move away, and Root feels that same, damnable, unconstrained smile spreading across her traitorous face again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry chems ily, but apparently root doesn't ╰(✿´⌣`✿)╯♡


	6. T-minus 1 week

“Hi,” Root says in surprise as she walks into Finch’s office. “Martine, right? What are you…?”

Martine turns slightly in one of the visitors’ chairs to smile coolly at Root. “Hello, Root. How are you?”

“Fine,” Root replies automatically, then belatedly notices Shaw glowering at her from her seat on the bookcase. “Hi, Sameen.”

Shaw stares at her for a second, then at the back of Martine’s head suspiciously, and Root could swear she can see the daggers Shaw’s shooting out from her mind at the both of them.

“Ms. Groves,” Finch says, voice stuffier than normal, “Have a seat.”

She settles into the chair, wary of the palpable tension in the room. She casts another curious glance at Martine, who meets her gaze with an impassive expression.

Finch clears his throat and folds his hands on his desk. “As I was explaining to Ms. Shaw earlier, Ms. Rousseau has come bearing some troubling news about the level of participation for IFTEC this year.”

Root stays silent, although she can feel her eyebrows raising. She hadn’t been aware that Martine was privy to any part of the planning process.

“The Academic Provost and I had a brief meeting earlier today, during which he expressed his concerns – which I share – about the numbers for registrations we’ve received so far.” Finch hesitates, and Root thinks she can detect some slight reticence there. It wouldn’t surprise her. Almost everyone knows about the Dean’s constant disagreements with the Provost over the direction their faculty should be taking.

“Dr. Greer and I are concerned about IFT’s reputation,” Martine interrupts. She turns again towards Root, ignoring Shaw behind her, and continues, “Given the fact that we’ll be hosting the State competition this year, it’s in our best interest to try to bring as many possible qualifiers to IFTEC.”

“Which we’re doing,” comes from behind, harsh and final in tone.

Root darts a glance over at Shaw, who’s still focusing on Martine with laser beam hostility. Also unsurprising, given the possibly underhanded ways with which Martine Rousseau had ended up being the winner of the scholarship and summer research placement that Shaw’s file indicated she had also applied for, now made more likely with Martine’s connections to Greer being known.

Martine smiles, but it’s brittle. “With the numbers you have right now, I am certain that many of our top contenders aren’t even aware of IFTEC.” She’s addressing Shaw, but continues to look at Root.

Uncomfortable, Root has to order herself not to shift in her chair or give away the creeping sense of unease that Martine gives her. She’s puzzled as to why she isn’t reacting the way Shaw is right now, with pride and defensiveness over the fairly adequate job they’d been doing so far. Instead, she nods slowly, watching Martine, trying to figure out what her angle is here.

Root takes another look back at Shaw, and is surprised to see Shaw’s glare directed at her now.

“And that is why we are being urged by Ms. Rousseau and Dr. Greer,” Finch says the last name with a barely detectable amount of distaste, “To delay IFTEC by one week in order to focus as much effort as possible in securing more registrations.”

“You have a little over 100 participants signed up right now,” Martine says, still not looking away from Root. “For a school of our size, we should be selecting our representatives from a pool of 400, at least.”

A disbelieving scoff escapes Shaw. “Right. We’ll just get 300 more signups in one week. Sure. No problem.”

“Better than none,” Martine replies, unruffled.

Finch looks as though he just wants all of them out of his office as soon as possible. “Ms. Shaw, Ms. Groves, please begin amending your promotional materials and announce that the competition has been delayed by one weekend. I will also be increasing your budgets for marketing and prizes, for which you can get in contact with Mr. Reese to obtain.”

“Wait,” Shaw cuts in. “We’re increasing the prize amounts, too?”

“Naturally,” Martine says. “We want to make sure it’s worth the while of our top students.”

Root narrows her eyes, finally having caught on to the entire reason Martine had single-handedly disrupted an entire competition, and caused her and Shaw and Finch to all be subtly chastised. “So you’ll be participating too, this year?”

A sly smile makes its way onto Martine’s face. “I’m looking forward to seeing you there, Root. Good luck with the rest of your planning process.”

With that, Martine rises out of her chair and departs without so much as another word, no doubt heading back to report to Greer that their scheming has paid off.

For the first time since she’d entered this school, Root is consumed by the urge to sign up for IFTEC, if only to defeat Martine in every category she registers in. Prestigious scholarship recipient or not, Greer’s little pet or not, Root _knows_ she can handle her.

A quick glance at the whitened knuckles bookending Shaw confirm that similar thoughts must be running through her mind as well.

“That will be all,” Finch says uneasily. He presses the intercom button on his phone when it becomes apparent that neither Shaw nor Root intend on leaving immediately. “Mr. Tao, would you get in contact with Mr. Reese, and ask him if he has time to meet with—”

“No need,” Root interrupts, really not relishing the idea of spending any more time with Reese than necessary, hurriedly exiting Finch’s office. Root sometimes finds that talking to Reese is like trying to force compatibility between stereo and mono sound; the loss of information in merging the stereo channels so that Reese can process the most important parts just sometimes isn’t worth the effort for Root. “Email will do just fine. Digital age, and all that.”

She can hear Shaw trailing along behind her after promising Finch that she’d get in touch with Reese, but rightly assumes that Shaw’s in too foul a mood to even withstand any teasing at all right now. The cause for the delay – besides Martine’s greed and Greer’s ambition – rests solely on the fact that both she and Shaw had slacked off on the vacant VP Communications’ duties for promotion, and Root isn’t eager to get in another argument with Shaw over their individual and combined responsibilities.

Still, the urge to say something she’ll likely regret is growing, so Root spins on her heel and takes a last-minute turn into a staircase and away from Shaw, before she has the chance to open her mouth and give Shaw a reason to get at her with those tiny – but determined – clenched fists.

 

* * *

 

 

Ringing the doorbell again, Shaw wonders if Root’s apartment is so rich and large that she can’t even hear the doorbell from all parts of it, or if Root secretly can’t afford to replace what increasingly appears to be a useless, broken doorbell.

She snickers a bit at that, enjoying the thought of Root’s priorities being so out of whack that little essentials for normal members of society – like doorbells – are relegated to the bottom of the list of things to spend tacky amounts of money on.

And speaking of tacky amounts of money, she is seriously beginning to consider dropping Fusco’s café from her snack rotation entirely. It’s been _months_ and business seems to be booming, if the obnoxiously new décor and appliances are anything to go by, but somehow he still hasn’t managed to adjust his Buffalo Crunch supply accordingly.

It’s almost as though he _wants_ to drive her away. If it weren’t for this stupid competition, Shaw would be all over this, because something’s fishy about this whole situation, and not just because his café looks about as dead and deserted as it always did.

Shaw pulls out her phone and frowns. She doesn’t have all day, and she knows Root just got home. Heaving a sigh, she notices that Root shows up in her recent callers list more times than she would ever like to admit.

“Hi, Sameen,” comes Root’s voice through the phone, teasing tone just as clear as if she were talking to Shaw in person.

“Root, open your door,” Shaw says, not bothering with pleasantries.

The door opens and Root stands there for a second, head tilted and still on the phone, considering Shaw with a delicate arch in her brow.

“Well, here’s a sight for sore eyes. What can I do for you?” she asks, leaning against the door playfully as she hangs up.

“Can I come in?”

“In the mood for some girl talk, are we?” Root chirps, standing aside and ignoring Shaw’s eye roll.

Shaw drops her backpack unceremoniously on the ground in Root’s dining room (this apartment has a _dining room_ with matching chairs and everything – whatever budget Root lives on, it’s clearly not a student one) and proceeds to make herself comfortable at the table, pulling out her laptop and notebooks.

Root’s approach is hesitant and almost tentative, causing a warm rush of satisfaction to surge in Shaw, but she’s careful not to let her smirk appear on her face. Ruefully, she realizes that she’s finally starting to enjoy this bizarre dynamic between her and Root, especially when she manages to throw Root off guard.

“Did I forget we had an IFTEC meeting?” Root asks carefully.

Shaw spares her a quick glance. “No.” She returns to her homework.

“Okay,” Root says, still bemused, settling into the chair next to Shaw’s, watching her try to get set up. “So it’s another study date, is it?”

“What’s your wi-fi password?” Shaw asks, ignoring Root.

Root stands up and comes behind Shaw’s chair, reaching over to type the password in.

Shaw’s gaze bounces between the two arms encircling her, feeling a scowl forming as she registers Root’s hair falling onto her own and the warmth she can feel radiating off of Root’s chest, which is far too close to the side of her head right now.

“That’s a beautiful stress-strain curve you have there,” Root murmurs, casually snooping through Shaw’s open windows to skim through the lab report she’s writing for biomaterials.

Shaw flicks her wrists to gesture for Root to go away and waits for the obvious follow-up.

“I can think of a better one we could make, though,” and Shaw can feel Root’s uneven smirk and light breath (of mint and apples) tickling her ear as Root’s hair cascades down Shaw’s arm.

Roughly pulling her chair in closer to the table, Shaw startles Root into backing up lest she catch the back of the chair with her chin, but notes the same warm rush of satisfaction running through her from before and frowns. Shaw watches Root sashay away to her kitchen out of the corner of her eye, suddenly regretting ever having followed her here.

Root had always been a shameless flirt – coquettish, teasing, coy from the first conversation they’d ever had – but sometime over the last week the nature of her come-ons had become more bald-faced and brash than Shaw could have ever imagined was possible. It’s somewhat (very) alarming for Shaw to note the unfortunate timing of her reluctant enjoyment of this back-and-forth.

“You have perfect timing,” Root calls from the kitchen, munching on something. “I was just about to eat.”

Shaw forgets about her gloomy thoughts and spins around in her chair to see Root walking back to the table with a bowl in each hand, one for herself and one for Shaw.

Mood considerably improved as she eats, Shaw opts not to pick a fight with Root over the disconcerting way she seems to be captivated by the sight of Shaw eating.

Instead, she focuses on her food, and so doesn’t notice that at some point Root left to bring her laptop to the table as well until she hears the sound of rapid clacking on a keyboard.

Shaw barely halts her eating while she pulls her chair over to look at what Root’s doing, fully expecting Root to turn her laptop screen away.

If there’s one thing Shaw’s learned about Root, it’s that she may be endlessly fascinated with poking about and learning every single thing about you, but heaven forbid you try to poke back. Shaw’s surprised Root even lets her into her apartment as often as she does, considering how jealously she seems to guard her privacy.

With some small measure of surprise, Shaw notes that Root actually turns her laptop screen _towards_ her, so that she can get a better look at what she’s doing.

“What’re you doing?” she finally says around the food in her mouth.

Root cheerfully continues typing away, pausing briefly to take another bite of food. “Increasing awareness of IFTEC for registrations.”

It takes a moment for Shaw to process what she’s looking at, but then… “Are you _hacking_ into the personal information of all the students in our faculty?”

Root doesn’t answer, but the small smile on her face is all the answer Shaw really needs.

“And now I suppose you’re embedding… great, yeah, so now you’re going to spy on whether or not people opened up the email. What’s that? Are you setting them up to send three times a day? You’re going to spam everyone into registering for IFTEC?”

“Relax,” Root says soothingly. “What do you think services like MailChimp do? It’s normal to log how many times a recipient opens a mass email.”

Shaw looks suspiciously at Root, then chews for a second, thinking. “So you’re saying it’s not illegal.”

“Well, that part isn’t.”

“But retrieving and sending emails to of all the currently enrolled students in our faculty…”

“I wouldn’t say illegal, but… perhaps a bit of a gray area,” Root admits, then smiles broadly. “Oh well, now it’s done.”

“What?” Shaw demands, grabbing at Root’s arm as if that could undo the thousands of emails that just got sent out (and would continue to be sent out over the next week). “Root!”

Moving her accusatory glare from the screen to Root, Shaw stalls, suddenly aware of the way Root’s gaze seems to be fixated on her lips, and the tenuous amount of space separating them.

“Root,” Shaw grinds out, low and under her breath. Her fingers dig into Root’s arm, and she’s gratified to see Root’s pupils dilate just the slightest from the pain. “I swear to god…”

“Mhm?” Root’s eyes are still lowered and focused on Shaw’s mouth.

“I am _not_ ending up back in Finch’s office for this.”

“Oh no, we don’t need Harold for this at all,” Root murmurs distantly. The air around them is cloying and thick, and Shaw’s eyes seem to be drifting downwards against her will as well.

Shaw abruptly lets go of Root’s arm and scoots back to her laptop. “We better not,” she mutters around a constriction in her throat, refusing to look back up at Root. “Check your email.”

She waits, wondering why it’s taking Root so long, but continues keeping herself occupied by her screen instead of glancing back up.

Eventually, Root speaks, sounding normal and upbeat. “What’s this, sweetie?”

Shaw notes the use of the endearment. She’s not sure what to make of it, so she ignores it. “I mean, if you’re going to be committing ethically gray acts, you may as well hack into something useful.”

She finally looks up at Root, who’s staring at her incredulously. “You want me to hack into the school to get to Casey’s test folders?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve had a chance to study with all this IFTEC hoopla going on.”

“No, Shaw,” Root says, voice stern. It’s jarring for Shaw to realize that Root is being the voice of reason right now, and she doesn’t like it. She also notes the rapid switch back to referring to her by her surname, and again, she’s not sure what to make of it. “That’s assuming Casey even keeps his tests on the school’s shared drives, and not his personal computer, which would then require some really not-gray acts to get to.”

An idea pops into Shaw’s head, barely-formed, spurred by the fact that Root seems to be even slightly considering it. She carefully positions her forearms on the table to get the most… appealing angle, as she leans forward. “Please?” she asks in an uncharacteristically honeyed voice, tilting her head and unknowingly doing her best Root impression.

The grin making its way across Root’s face as she takes the sight of Shaw in is mirrored on Shaw’s own face, if not tempered by the same beginning hints of triumph that are colouring Shaw’s expression.

“You think you’re being cute,” Root allows with a wry smile after a little while, shaking her head. “But no.”

All traces of sweetness escape Shaw as she sits heavily back into her chair. That was a bust. And she didn’t _think_ she was cute, she knew she was, and that routine ought to have worked on Root.

“You’re useless,” Shaw grumbles, opening her genetic engineering textbook. She can feel Root’s eyes boring into her, and she looks up with a truculently mutinous expression on her face, only to be startled by a reserved pair of eyes.

“Did Harold or Reese ever tell you how I got hooked into planning IFTEC?” Root asks, voice mild but serious.

Shaw shakes her head, unsure of where this is going. It isn’t that she hadn’t _wondered_ , but she eventually figured that Root had too much money and time and too few things to occupy it with.

Root smiles, slightly, and sardonically. “Then I won’t ruin the surprise. But let’s just say I’m on the straight and narrow for a little while.” Root considers the emails she just sent out. “Well, mostly.”

Shaw watches Root’s gaze discreetly flicker over to the framed photograph of the two girls on her bookshelf in the living room. The one she’d managed to distract Shaw from getting a good look at the past few times she’d been to her apartment, in ways that had been neither smooth nor subtle. Shaw files it away thoughtfully.

“Sounds boring,” Shaw says after a pause, not really sure what to make of the somber downwards turn of the corners of Root’s mouth.

A veil of geniality swiftly seems to drop down over Root, as though Root is suddenly cognizant of the unusually bleak mood, and she wrinkles her nose playfully and shrugs at Shaw. “It kind of was.”

Root’s mouth twists whimsically into a leer as she leans toward Shaw and smiles, continuing, “Well, before I met you, anyway.”

Flustered, Shaw drops her eyes quickly back down to the pages of her book and keeps them there until the aura surrounding them returns back to its normal, cavalier dynamic. She doesn’t quite know what to do otherwise.


	7. T-minus 1 week (again)

Root’s head pops up curiously over Shaw’s shoulder, but Shaw slips her phone into her pocket before Root can get a good look at what she’s doing. With an irritated shake of her head, Shaw shoots a quick glare at Root, meaning clear: _Mind your own beeswax_.

Unfazed, Root bites into an apple cheerfully and continues pushing the cart. “So, what’s next on our list?”

Shaw pulls her phone out reluctantly, slowing her pace by a half step so that she falls slightly behind Root. “Dixie cups. 500 of them.”

Root stops in her tracks. “500? Do we really need that many?”

Ignoring her and continuing to search for the right aisle, Shaw shrugs.

“This is Greenfield’s list,” she says, but she isn’t sure Root heard her, because she can hear faint mumbling and calculations being made.

“32 senior design groups… and 41 junior design groups… probably needs 2 per team … but the materials store for junior design… and if they come in packs of 100, then…”

Shaw turns down an aisle, spotting the cups, and hears Root roll on right by, absorbed with the numbers. “Root,” she calls irritably. She’s still miffed about the hardware store, where she’d had to lug around boxes of tungsten carbide end mills along with unwieldy hammers in her arms after Root had wandered off in search of something shiny.

“I trust Jason, but I feel like 500 would just be wasteful…” Root’s saying as she catches up with Shaw. “I mean, after buying all those Arduinos, and then the motors, my credit card bill…”

Root catches sight of Shaw’s stink-eye. “What?” she asks defensively. “I made a really large purchase last week, plus I don’t want to hit my credit limit before I get these cheque reqs back. Especially if you want me to pay for the pizza during the competition.”

“Don’t tell me you can afford a brand new motorcycle, but not pizza,” Shaw says drily, piling packages of cups into the cart.

Floundering momentarily, Root’s suddenly uncomfortably aware that Shaw isn’t going to be put at a disadvantage anymore when it comes to knowing too much personal information. She opts not to ask Shaw how she found out that she’d bought a motorcycle, especially since she’d paid in cash and it was still sitting at the shop.

“Pizza for 700 isn’t cheap, you know,” she says archly.

“Never figured you to be stingy,” Shaw says under her breath, but Root can feel her ears pricking, suddenly liking the turn this conversation has taken.

“Never figured you to be the gold-digger in this relationship,” Root grins, already anticipating Shaw’s response.

“Excuse me?” Shaw slowly turns around, one package of bright red Dixie cups in each hand. Root looks her over, unable to hide her amusement at the idea that strangers would probably look at her and consider her to be the angriest little freshman ever tasked with prepping for a party.

“You heard me, Sameen,” Root says breezily, plucking the packages out of Shaw’s hands and dropping them into the cart as she strolls past. “What happened to you being the breadwinning future surgeon I thought I met all those weeks ago?”

Root can almost hear Shaw debating over whether or not to engage with her. Tossing a quick wink over her shoulder, she adds, “That’s what I liked about you,” and watches Shaw’s mouth form the word “ _liked_ ” silently.

They walk in silence for a few seconds, Shaw’s heels clicking in time with Root’s, before Shaw finally says, “Yeah, well, becoming a surgeon is expensive.”

Something in Shaw’s tone is telling her that they’re about done bantering over money. If there’s one thing Root’s familiar with, it’s the discomfort surrounding conversations about money when you don’t seem to have enough of it. So Root hums in agreement and says lightly, “Well, if you ever need someone to play doctor with… for practice, of course.”

Shaw rolls her eyes, but there’s the faintest smile on her face as she replies. “Only way that’d happen is if I was the reason you needed stitches in the first place.”

Root waggles her eyebrows playfully. “I thought that was a given. The only catch is… I give as good as I get.”

She’s mildly concerned that Shaw’s face might actually get stuck in a permanent eye roll one day.

Finally on the last item of their list for materials for the competition, they’ve wound up in front of what seems like 20 different types of toilet paper. Root starts making mental calculations to find the brand with the best value, absorbed in the minute satisfaction of getting a good deal.

After some time, she looks over to see what Shaw’s doing, only to see her glued to her phone again.

Root leans forward just the slightest, curiosity growing, craning her neck.

 _I’m just trying to apply pressure at the right points to get you to yield. Is it working?_ Her eyes narrow as she registers the name “Tomas” at the top of Shaw’s screen.

Root pivots abruptly and determinedly tosses a few random packages of toilet paper into the cart, before purposefully making her way over to the checkout lines. She can hear Shaw’s heels clicking rapidly after her, trying to keep up with her longer stride, and she doesn’t bother stopping the petty smirk growing on her face.

Root wonders how difficult it’d be to convince Jason to retool the senior design challenge to incorporate more programming and circuitry and other topics she’s sure Tomas knows next to nothing about. Maybe cut out a few mechanical engineering concepts while they’re at it. Heck, she’d be happy to spring another thousand bucks to provide each team with their own little open segment shield and get them to do something easy like little 7-segment displays, if only because she’s sure Tomas would barely even know what to do with a microcontroller datasheet.

She smiles blandly without saying anything when Shaw catches up to her in the line. Shaw doesn’t bring up Root’s sudden eagerness to get this shopping excursion over with after dawdling and lingering around all day, but she does scrutinize the expression on Root’s face suspiciously.

Root pulls her credit card out with a flourish and wiggles it at the cashier. “Visa,” she says airily, turning a dazzling smile from its full blast on the cashier to Shaw. “Don’t worry, sweetie, I’ll get this one.”

Shaw rolls her eyes and pushes past her to start loading the items into bags. “Never figured you to be humble, either,” she mutters, but as it has done over the past few days, her voice is lacking in pique, and it seems more and more that Shaw grumbles at her just for the sake of grumbling at her.

Root finds herself just standing there and considering Shaw for a moment, idly contemplating what a smile not brought on by sarcasm, food, or the threat of bodily harm to Root might look like. She knows what’s happening here, has known for some time, and she knows herself too well to able to just pretend that it doesn’t feel like it’s eating away at her. _No_ , she thinks drolly, _that’s more Shaw’s style than mine_.

Shaking it off, she turns back to the cashier prompting her to enter her PIN. “Sorry about that,” she says, voice artificially sweet. “It’s been a long week.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Shaw,” Root repeats plaintively, still sitting cross-legged on the floor. She’s holding out another motor.

“Again?” Shaw grumbles, as she gets up from her own seat on the floor to cross over to where the soldering iron had been plugged in.

Root smiles prettily at her. “I know how much you enjoy this sort of thing.”

She shimmies over just the bare minimum required for Shaw to squeeze into the corner by the wall outlet.

Shaw’s intensely aware of Root leaning close to watch her repair the motor’s fragile connections. There’s still a heady combination of lit matches and vanilla in the air surrounding Root, but this time with the scent of crisp autumn afternoons mixed in.

“Alright, pay attention,” Shaw says briskly. “I don’t want to have to come over here each time.” Without thinking, she tucks Root’s long hair behind her ear so it won’t fall into her workspace.

To Shaw’s immense relief once she snatches her hand back after registering what she just did, Root doesn’t immediately say anything, but there’s something about her eyes that Shaw can’t seem to look away from. One of Root’s hands comes up behind the lock of hair Shaw had moved.

Before Shaw knows what’s happening, Root’s taken her safety goggles off and settled them on Shaw’s face instead, with a light tap of approval as Root considers the look on her.

She normally isn’t one for desperately wracking her brain for ways to end any uncomfortable silence, but Shaw now finds herself grasping at the first jibe she can think of while narrowing her eyes at Root. “This is what you get when you buy the cheapest motors. And then I end up having to come over here each time to do all the work.”

Root leans forward some more, resting her chin on Shaw’s shoulder in a manner similar to when she’d been asking Shaw for help she didn’t even need during the info session. Beginning to sense a pattern, Shaw pauses for a moment—

“Admit it, you like it over in this corner of the room,” Root says teasingly.

“I like that you somehow managed to hog this lab’s entire power supply,” Shaw retorts.

With a calculated smirk and a blatant once-over, Root says, “Oh, we’re definitely generating some juice over here.” Her face scrunches up in an exaggerated wink.

Shaw makes a face, fighting the urge to laugh. “God, Root. That was _terrible_.”

Root’s responding laughter is same genuine, dorky laugh she’d heard a few times before, and Shaw's surprised to find herself laughing as well.

“I live to please,” Root says, voice lilting as her eyes dance between Shaw’s eyes and mouth.

Shaw wets her lips, feeling oddly satisfied when Root’s pupils dilate, then decisively breaks eye contact and settles into a cross-legged position on the floor. She turns just slightly away as she finishes up with the motor, then peers into the box of all the other motors with damaged connections to be soldered back together.

“How about we switch? You can put together the junior design kits, and I can handle this here,” Shaw says, a little startled when her voice starts out unevenly.

“Or I could just sit here with you,” Root breathes, leaning ever closer.

Shaw doesn’t realize she’s been pointing the soldering iron threateningly at Root until she sees Root’s eyes flicker downwards with anticipation. Adjusting her grip on the iron, Shaw can feel herself biting her lip, noting Root’s steadily darkening irises. Shaw opens her mouth to respond, unsure if a caustic remark or something else is about to emerge.

Suddenly Root brightens and laughs a little – and not the dorky laugh that’s beginning to grow on Shaw – before she gets a chance to say anything. Root scoots back along the floor to get to the junior design kit materials, and gets to work, humming lightly under her breath.

They haven’t done much more work before Root interrupts the quiet again, picking up a medal from one of the piles she’s sorting through. “What’s this?”

“Oh,” Shaw says. “That’s mine, it must have fallen out of my bag. Just leave it.”

She watches Root examine it carefully, feeling a faint sense of nervousness building. “You can put it in my coat pocket.”

Root nods absently but ignores her, still studying it. “Is this Russian?” She looks up at Shaw, who’s paused her soldering and is debating whether or not Root will give her more trouble or less if she just leans over and snatches it away.

“Something like that,” Shaw says, finally deciding to just pretend it doesn’t mean anything so that Root will just drop it.

But, of course, that would be assuming Root wasn’t a pain in the ass who didn’t get a perverse sense of joy from poking around in other peoples’ business. “I didn’t know you were Russian,” Root says thoughtfully.

“I’m not,” Shaw says shortly.

Root nods to herself. “That’s what I thought.”

Setting her work down, Shaw sighs and turns to face Root. “I’m holding onto it for a friend.”

To her relief, Root finally leans back a bit and tucks the medal into Shaw’s jacket pocket. “Looks like an heirloom from Soviet days.”

Shaw doesn’t respond, just stares at Root and waits for her to stop talking.

“Like a war medal, or something. Must be worth a lot,” Root continues prodding.

Shaw stays silent.

“Hmm,” Root says, amused. “Alright. Funny that you carry something like that around with you, though.”

Shaw rolls her eyes and exhales through her nose. “It belongs to this kid Finch makes me tutor, okay? She keeps dropping it in my bag, and I keep giving it back to her. Little brat.”

Root grins, and Shaw’s instantly regretting telling her so much. “Why does she want you to have it?”

She waits patiently while Shaw has a brief internal struggle before replying reluctantly. “She goes to this boarding school with a bunch of other foster kids, and she’s paranoid that it’ll get stolen there or something. I don’t know. Not that it’s safer with me, since you got your paws all over it just now.”

Root flutters said paws teasingly. “That’s sweet.”

Shaw grunts in disagreement.

“Sameen Shaw, student mentor. There’s a twist.”

“I’m not her mentor,” Shaw says huffily. “Gen just doesn’t have anyone else in her life to bother, the little punk.”

Root smiles down at her work a little at that, but the edges are tinged with something. Shaw studies it for a second, then quickly looks away before Root catches her watching.

“Everyone needs someone,” Root says softly, after a while.

The alarmingly unusual tone catches Shaw’s attention again, but Root doesn’t meet Shaw’s gaze, still focused on packing the sets of materials for the competition. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

A minute or two passes in silence, before Shaw finally asks, “So who was your someone?”

She can _feel_ Root looking at her in surprise, but this time it’s her turn to keep her attention fixed on one of the last motors she has left to repair. The seconds tick by, but Shaw isn’t going to repeat herself, and if Root wants to pretend she didn’t say anything…

“Her name was Hanna,” Root says eventually.

The use of _was_ immediately piques Shaw’s curiosity, but she just nods silently and moves on to the next motor. She waits for Root to continue, but somehow she knows that that’s about as much as Root is going to say for now.

Sure enough, Root finishes up with her work and starts loading a dolly with all the completed packages. “Did you ever have someone? Besides Gen,” Root asks, voice back to being annoyingly sharp and bright.

Shaw’s about done with her work too, and she unplugs the iron and starts cleaning up. “I don’t do _someones_ ,” she snorts.

“No?” Root asks, and even though her voice is as teasing as it’s ever been, Shaw feels like Root’s actually asking something else.

“No,” she says firmly, handing the box of repaired motors to Root to add to the dolly. “Relationships are for amateurs.” She pushes the box at Root again, waiting for her to take it, but Root’s too busy _assessing_ Shaw.

Shaw sighs and pushes past Root to drop the box on the dolly herself. “People have too many emotions. I don’t have the time to deal with that.”

“You don’t have the time, or you don’t know how?” Root asks, putting her jacket on.

“I know enough,” Shaw says defensively, pulling her own jacket on as well. “I’m just pragmatic.”

Root hums in amusement and starts pushing the dolly towards the door. “Pragmatic. Now that sounds fun.”

Shaw holds the door open for her, but steps forward just as Root brushes by. “Oh, I know how to have fun,” she says quietly, immensely gratified to see Root’s throat bobbing as she swallows. Shaw lets a wicked smile grow on her face, then steps out from the door to let Root catch it in surprise.

“I have fun for one night,” Shaw says, checking her phone. “Three, tops. Anything more than that is just… messy.” She doesn’t bother turning around to see Root’s reaction.

“You’re right,” Root says after a moment. “That is pragmatic.”

They wait for the elevator in silence.

“Wanna get a bite to eat?” Shaw asks eventually. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry,” Root says affectionately.

Shaw levels a glower at her. “So?”

“I could get something to eat,” Root allows. “You like Lionel’s café, right? That’s nearby.”

Preoccupied with replying to a few texts, it takes Shaw a moment for Root’s words to sink in. Her steps slow as she considers Root from behind, nonchalantly pushing the cart down the sidewalk. “How well do you know him?”

“Hmm?” Root asks, but her pace seems to quicken. Shaw catches up easily, watching Root’s face carefully. Root looks even more like the cat that ate the canary than usual, and a creeping sense of misgiving is filling Shaw.

“Fusco, how well do you know him?”

Root shrugs carelessly. “I wouldn’t say I know him.”

“It took me a whole year to learn his name,” Shaw informs her. “He kept calling me one half of the ‘mayhem twins,’ just because I came in with Reese the very first time.”

“You and the big lug?” Root asks, amused.

“Just because we broke a few things…” Shaw mutters.

“Sounds like a story,” Root says, and her chipper tone and eagerness to change the subject are fuelling Shaw’s suspicions. “In any case, that’s a far better nickname than the one he has for me.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” she asks, still rapidly cataloguing all those _annoying as hell_ notes that had been left behind for her and wondering why they were all so familiarly rage-inducing.

“Crazy town banana pants,” Root says matter-of-factly. “Although I think he called me ‘nutter butter’ last time.”

Shaw stops dead in her tracks, remembering the first time Fusco had described the donut thief to her as “nutty,” before he’d clammed up and just started shoving those stupid, taunting notes at her.

Root enters the café and waves jauntily at Fusco, who takes one look at Root and the look of apoplectic violence on Shaw’s face right behind her before ducking into the back and yelling, “One sec, I think I’m out of milk, be right back!”

“Take your time, Lionel,” Root calls back, sounding colossally pleased with herself.

Shaw takes a look at the display case – and for the first time in _months_ , there isn’t just one Buffalo Crunch donut still left in there, but _three_ – and stomps over to Root, ready to wipe that self-satisfied smirk from her face.

She stops when the smile on Root’s face falls off, not because she’s looking at Shaw approach her, but at something outside the window. Turning to look, she spots Tomas waving at her from just outside the café.

Pausing for only the briefest second to appraise the deep look of concern on Root’s face, Shaw abruptly changes her trajectory and makes her way outside to join Tomas instead. Casually flipping her hair and catching a glimpse of Root’s resentful face behind her in the process, Shaw makes sure to send a vindictive smile her way.

“Oh, you’re in a good mood,” Tomas says in surprise when she reaches him.

“Am I?” Shaw asks.

“It’s almost a little scary,” Tomas jokes, but there’s a nugget of truth in there that Shaw appreciates.

“I’m hungry,” she says, ignoring him. “Let’s go eat.”


	8. Competition day 1

Shaw curses inwardly when she sees a familiar blonde head somewhere down the sign-in line. Looking around for Root, who is _eleven minutes late_ , a host of uncharitable thoughts about both Martine and Root are tumbling around in her brain and fighting for dominance. She sighs and grits her teeth when she sees that there isn’t anyone nearby to relieve her at the check-in table.

“Ah, the glorious work of a co-Chair,” Martine sounds haughty and amused, and Shaw resists the urge to wipe that silly smirk off her face.

“Team name?” she asks instead, ignoring the jibe.

Martine leans over and peers at Shaw’s list, running her finger down the small number of registered programming teams. “Here we are.”

“Where’s your teammate?” Shaw asks, snatching her clipboard back. “All members of your team need to sign in at the same time.”

Lambert steps out from behind Martine. “Present,” he says.

It doesn’t surprise Shaw that Martine and Lambert have been put together to be Greer’s dream team. She looks Lambert up and down, scoffing to herself at the pretentious suit he’s wearing, like he isn’t just a student like the rest of them.

“You’ve been assigned to a room,” Shaw says, ticking them off on her clipboard. _Far, far away from me_ , she adds in her head. “Alright, here are your nametags. You can head up to room 408, and we’ll be emailing you your challenge at 5:30 p.m.”

“I have to say, I’m impressed with the increase in turnout that you managed to get in just one week.”

Shaw’s eyes narrow, highly suspicious of anything even remotely resembling a compliment coming from Martine. She looks down at the lower ground lobby, where just over three hundred students are milling around and waiting for the first day of the competition to begin. “Yeah, well, we would have managed just fine even without the one-week extension.”

Martine smirks. “Well, you know what they say. If at first you don’t succeed, try management. Although you never did seem to have any ambition to try to compete in IFTEC to begin with.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shaw sets her clipboard down, ready to step out from behind the table.

“Hey, Shaw,” Root says, ambling up to the table. “Sorry I’m late. Oh, hi, Martine.”

Martine gives Root what she probably thinks is a suitable facsimile of a warm smile, then turns to her teammate and says, “Come meet me in our room once you’re done here,” with a meaningful glance at Root that Shaw doesn’t miss.  

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Lambert says after nodding at Martine, looking interestedly at Root.

Shaw’s eyes narrow further, but then the next waiting team steps forward and she turns her attention back to her job. She notes with irritation that Root is just standing there making idle chit-chat with Lambert, instead of helping her with the sign-ins.

“Oh, yes,” Lambert is saying. “Martine has spoken highly of you, you know. She’s actually taken quite a liking, and I can see why.”

Shaw scoffs to herself. Martine doesn’t “take a liking” to anyone but her own reflection. Even compared to Shaw, with an emotional capacity generally limited only to range between annoyed and furious, Martine is like a robot. Smug and blank, those are about the only two settings she has.

The flattered, somewhat awkward laugh that Root responds with is grating on Shaw’s ears as she clenches her jaw and shoves a handful of nametags at some terrified-looking first-years.

She doesn’t hear what Root actually says in reply, but she can see the shit-eating grin on Lambert’s face out of the corner of her eye, so she’s probably pretty safe in assuming that yet another nerd is falling prey to Root’s dubious charms, albeit intentionally this time. Shaw is acutely apprehensive of whatever weird ulterior motives Martine must have in siccing her teammate on Root.

And since when did Root and Martine know each other, anyway? How did that happen? Was it some sort of cosmic joke that the two biggest nuisances in Shaw’s life are apparently chummy with each other?

She spots Root wrinkling her nose impishly at Lambert as she says something undoubtedly flirty – not that she’s _watching_ what Root’s doing – and Shaw waves Carter over impatiently.

“You take over here.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Carter says, raising an eyebrow at the look on Shaw’s face. “Everything alright?”

“Don’t worry about it. Hey, if people give you a hard time about needing to have all their teammates here for sign-ins…” Shaw says.

“I got it,” Carter says, amused.

Shaw considers Carter, standing just under 5’5” with a resolute arch in her brow and an impatient wave of the hand for Shaw to just go away and let her get to work.

Shaw nods, grins, then snatches up a paper bag and makes her way determinedly over to Root, who’s just finishing up her conversation with Lambert as he heads upstairs.

“Hey, Root,” Shaw says, smile turning grim before fading away entirely. “Got a sec?”

“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Root says, wrinkling her nose in the exact same way she just did with Lambert a second ago. Her own smile slips a bit from her face as she clocks the hell-bent purpose in Shaw’s eye, made more resolute by the evidence of Root trying to use the same repertoire of premeditated coquettishness on just about anyone. “What’s… up, Sameen?”

Shaw holds the paper bag out. “I got you something,” she says shortly.

“Thanks,” Root says automatically, reaching out for it. She doesn’t look inside, though, and her expression is growing steadily warier as she tries to get a read on Shaw.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Shaw asks, making the effort to pull her face into a something resembling a smile.

Root’s still watching her apprehensively, then eyes the bag. She looks at Shaw one more time, before peering inside. Her face pales.

“I heard you really, _really_ enjoyed these, so I stopped by this morning and waited till Lionel pulled a fresh batch out of the oven.”

“Sameen—”

“Go on,” Shaw says, vaguely threateningly. “Eat it. These are _incredibly_ hard to get a hold of lately. So popular, they just fly right out of the display case.”

“Look, before you do anything drastic—”

“What makes you say that?” Shaw asks, but she _has_ been slowly backing Root into the space under the stairs and behind a support pillar, with nowhere else to go and nobody else nearby.  

Shaw watches the movement of Root’s throat as she swallows uneasily, still keeping the bag held up between them, even as the gap between them continues to narrow. Root’s eyes have stopped darting around behind her, looking for potential witnesses, and are now locked into Shaw’s eyes.

Root’s back hits the pillar, and she’s trying to smile nervously down at her. Shaw can practically hear Root trying to come up with a good explanation, and the fact that she hadn’t already had one prepared is what spurs Shaw to swipe the bag back, leaving Root clutching empty air and making it look like she’s making a feeble attempt to ward Shaw off.

The sight amuses Shaw more than it should.

“What did you think was going to happen?” she asks Root, genuinely curious.

She waits patiently for a response, content to haul Root up against the pillar by a one-handed grip on her collar for as long as it takes, until Root eventually shrugs tentatively. “I wasn’t really… thinking.”

“That’s not surprising,” Shaw snorts.

Root’s posture is still tense, and Shaw can feel light, unsteady puffs of air on her face with each shaky breath. They’re standing close enough that Shaw can read not only every microscopic hint of anxiety that crosses Root’s face, but also the barely concealed anticipation lurking just underneath, almost as if Root is looking _forward_ to whatever Shaw does next.

Shaw pushes the fistful of Root’s shirt against the base of her neck, unapologetic about the way the back of Root’s head is digging into the cold, hard concrete of the pillar. “You better thank your lucky stars we still need to work together,” she breathes quietly, aware that Root is hanging onto her every word.

“ _Nobody_ ,” she says, leaning her weight against her entire forearm down the length of Root’s torso, “Nobody messes with my food.”

She can feel the muscles of Root’s throat working hard to swallow against the base of her fist. Every part of her making contact with Root – the medial portion of her hand, the ulnar length of her forearm, the proximal span of her thigh – they’re all almost _buzzing_ with warmth, and once Shaw realizes this, the heat ramps up to feel searing to the touch.

Shaw lets go as if burned. Exhaling through her nose and maintaining her glower, she takes a step back, reaching into the bag and taking a large, healthy bite of the donut – _her_ donut – before turning around.

She’s oddly satisfied at how visibly affected Root was, and each bite continues to drastically improve her mood.

“Still got it,” she says to herself, pleased. She strolls back toward the sign-in tables, feeling almost _mellow_ , and starts plotting how to make Root’s life a living hell once this competition is over.

 

* * *

 

 

Root abruptly drops her feet from their relaxed position on the table and sits up in her chair when she spots Tomas and Shaw coming out of the materials storage room together.

She can’t see Shaw’s face, but she doesn’t like the eager look on Tomas’ face at all. Root’s gratified to see Shaw brush Tomas off irritably when he tries to take over pushing the loaded dolly for her, as if he thinks she’s too small or fragile to do it herself.

 _Rookie mistake_ , Root snickers to herself. She chews on her pen, trying to gauge Shaw’s mood from her side profile.

She hasn’t been _tiptoeing_ around Shaw all day, per se, but having a buffer nearby couldn’t hurt. Someone Shaw more or less gets along with, but is still fairly disposable in case anything goes sideways.

She spies Reese lurking against the side wall, silently observing everything, probably to report back to Finch.

“Hey, John,” she says, smiling brightly at him. “Did you get a chance to tell Shaw the good news? Let’s go tell her together.”

“What good news?” Reese asks, but he lets himself be nudged forward by her, looking faintly amused, as if he knows she’s got something up her sleeve.

“The good news you just told me a few minutes ago,” Root prompts as they pull up to meet Shaw and Tomas.

Root studiously avoids looking at Shaw, instead focusing her attention on Reese, hoping she won’t have to find an inconspicuous way to feed him every single line.

“Oh, what Finch thinks of everything so far?”

“There’s the one,” Root says happily.

“Finch was here? What did he say?” Shaw asks curiously. She looks between Reese and Root expectantly, and Root’s immensely pleased to see that Shaw appears to be in a thankfully good mood right now, as far as good moods for Shaw went. No hint of impending bloodshed to be found at all.

“Finch? As in our Dean?” Tomas butts in.

“I’m sorry, I don’t recall your name,” Root replies sweetly. She thinks she can see Shaw smirk slightly in her peripheral vision. “Were you a volunteer tonight?”

“Tomas, I competed in senior design. I just thought I’d help clean up, and some of us could walk home together since it _is_ past 1 a.m.,” Tomas says, the very definition of _not subtle_ as his gaze lingers on Shaw. Shaw meets his gaze head-on, but Root can’t shake the feeling that the smirk on Shaw’s face is directed at her right now, and not Tomas.

“This is privileged information about the competition,” Reese says neutrally. Root nods approvingly. Maybe she’d underestimated the Lurch. He could be useful, after all.

Tomas looks at Shaw, as if he’s waiting for her to say something. Shaw’s watching Root’s carefully arranged expression with a half-smile instead, and she shrugs.

“Thanks for helping us clean up,” Shaw says.

“Anytime,” Tomas says eventually. He’s clearly disappointed, but Root scowls as he pulls Shaw into a brief hug before leaving. She’s almost relieved when she sees Shaw’s look of disgust at the sentimentality peeking out from over his shoulder, but she still watches him leave with a sour taste in her mouth.

She looks back at Shaw, and is startled to find Shaw watching her intently. Before she gets a chance to decide how to respond, Reese clears his throat.

“Anyway, Finch was impressed. Good work. See you tomorrow,” he says, and follows Tomas out the door before they get a chance to respond.

Shaw watches him leave with a bemused smile on her face. “Thanks, John,” she calls after him.

Root shifts her weight from one foot to another. It’s just the two of them now, with everyone else already having left long ago.

“I’ll put the tables away if you do the floors,” Shaw suggests.

They finish up the last of the cleaning quietly, both tired after a long first day. Root bends when she hears something scraping gently against the tile floor and picks up a small ring from the dustpile. “This yours?”

Shaw walks over and peers at it. “Not my style at all,” she says dismissively.

“No?” Root asks, reaching for Shaw’s hand without even thinking. She holds the burnished ring up against Shaw’s pinky and eyes it appraisingly.

Shaw looks up at Root, expression inscrutable and eyes dark, leaving her finger in Root’s grip. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” she says drily. “But fussing over jewelry isn’t really my thing.”

Root’s other hand brushes Shaw’s hair out of the way to tap knowingly against the cartilage studs in her ear. Shaw’s eyes widen slightly at Root having noticed the unobtrusive piercings, and she shakes her head almost imperceptibly in amused exasperation.

“An iron ring would suit you,” Root says.

Shaw’s hand flexes slightly in Root’s, before she plucks the ring out of Root’s hand and slides it onto Root’s pinky instead. “More your style than mine. Look, it even fits.”

“You’re not even looking at it,” Root protests halfheartedly. The ring is about two sizes too big for her pinky, but the loose cling of the metal against her finger is still being held in place by Shaw.

Shaw shrugs. “Don’t need to. Besides, I’m headed straight to med school, I don’t need engineering trinkets. Never wanted the iron ring.”

Shaw gently lets their hands drop, and Root lets the ring slide off her finger and places it on the lobby desk where the other lost items are being kept.

“What,” Root says in mock surprise. “But who knows what kind of debauchery happens at those top-secret iron ring ceremonies.”

“Nothing we haven’t seen before, I’m sure,” Shaw says, voice lowering just the slightest in timbre as she maintains deliberate eye contact with Root.

Root places her palms on the lobby desk, keeping it safely between them as she leans forward and smiles down at Shaw. “Oh, I believe you’ve seen your share of debauchery, Shaw,” she says lightheartedly with a wink.

The grin on Shaw’s face is wide and unchecked, and Root smiles back automatically. “What?” she asks.

Shaw shakes her head at first, but then stubbornly purses her lips in an effort not to laugh. “Did you know that you don’t know how to wink?”

“What?” Root repeats, this time indignantly. “That’s not true.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Shaw says, and gives Root an exaggerated wink of her own as if to show her how it’s done, before turning and walking out.

Root stays frozen at the desk, heartbeat stuttering briefly. Turning to face the window, she watches her reflection close both eyes when she winks.

Root laughs to herself and rubs her tired face with both hands, nonplussed. She shakes her head before following Shaw out the door, feeling unexpectedly energized at the thought of being back in less than 6 hours for the second day of the competition.


	9. Competition day 2

“Good morning!”

“Ohh, is that coffee? For us?” Carter breathes, reaching out automatically. “Root, I could kiss you.”

“Get in line,” Zoe says as she steps into Root’s path to intercept her.

Shaw watches Zoe and Carter bicker amicably as they take their first sips of caffeine with her head laying sideways on the table. She grunts a feeble thanks when Greenfield helpfully places a cup on the table for her, but her attention is taken by the altogether too cheerful bustling about that Root is doing in putting together the judges’ rubrics.

She closes her eyes tiredly. She can’t even look at that much energy right now.

What feels like barely even a minute of peace goes by before a sympathetic “Oh, sweetie, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you look hungover,” is whispered into her ear.

Shaw opens one eye to glare up at the donut bandit. She still hasn’t decided if Root’s been forgiven yet, but right now, at 7:42 a.m., she’s leaning towards a firm _no_.

Root pulls up a chair beside her and places a container in front of her face. Reluctantly, Shaw lifts her head so she can take a look at it. She doesn’t bother expending any energy in asking what the hell it is, just levels an expectant look at Root.

“Brought you something,” Root smiles. “Here, let me open it for you.”

Shaw decides that frowning requires the use of fewer muscles, and therefore less effort, than leaning away from Root as she draws closer to open the lid, and so the gentle notes of Root’s shampoo fill her senses. Soon the frown on her face disappears as she smells food. Warm food.

She peers into the container. “What… the hell is this?”

“Breakfast,” Root says happily. “I made it myself.”

Shaw stares at it some more. “Breakfast” is not the word she would use to describe… whatever is in there.

“For you,” Root adds helpfully.

Shaw glances at Root skeptically, then back down at the mysteriously splotchy eggs-scrambled-with-who-knows-what-else and simultaneously soggy _and_ overtoasted bread.

“Uh…” she says. “Thanks… I think.”

Root holds a fork out encouragingly.

Accepting it reluctantly, Shaw continues studying the contents of the container, trying to identify what looks safest to eat. Those things in the corner next to the mutilated orange slices look like tomatoes. Or… former strawberries.

Shaw looks once more at Root, who’s watching her with bright eyes and a proud smile. For some strange reason, Shaw almost feels like smiling, and she’s exceedingly confused about it, because it’s still before 8 a.m. and she’s still only running on about three and a half hours of sleep.

Gingerly, Shaw spears what she thinks is a piece of sausage, and carefully puts it in her mouth.

Root doesn’t need to say anything for Shaw to hear the expectant “Well?”

Shaw finishes chewing and nods a bit, before sparing Root a quick frown of approval. “Not bad, actually.”

Root beams at her. “It’s a peace offering.”

Shaw’s digging in with gusto at this point, so she just snorts in response and continues eating.

Tucking her chin in both palms and resting her elbows on her knees, Root watches Shaw for the duration of her meal with only a hint of smugness. It’s still too much smugness for Shaw to accept from a so-called “peace” offering, though, so she sits back when she’s done and clears her throat.

“Do you normally have breakfast?”

“Oh, that’s touching, Sameen, but I already—”

Shaw’s almost amused that Root thinks she was concerned for _her_ appetite. “No,” she interrupts, waving her hands at the remains of the contents of the container. “Because you clearly need some practice with… presentation.”

Root tosses her hair over her shoulder and comes in closer. “Oh,” she breathes, not in the least deterred. “You could always give me private lessons.”

Grabbing the no-longer piping hot coffee, Shaw stands up and huffs exasperatedly. “People are arriving to present whatever they made last night to the judges. Let’s go set up.”

Humming agreeably, Root catches up to her. Their sleeves brush occasionally as they make their way to the presentation room, with Shaw uncomfortably aware of the minute increases and decreases in the distance separating them as their strides fall into sync.

When they enter the presentation room, they’re surprised to find the first group of presenters already there and trying to fiddle with the projection system.

“Hey,” Shaw says loudly. “You shouldn’t be touching that.”

A tiny little girl at the front looks up at them, startled. Her gaze flickers from Shaw to land on Root, and her mouth falls open a little.

“Oh my god,” she says. “You’re Root.”

Root smiles in response, a little taken aback. “Guilty.”

The girl steps away from the projection system and gestures for her team members to do the same. Shaw slides in front of the podium protectively and begins trying to figure out if anything was tampered with, while still keeping a wary eye on the awestruck little mischief-maker currently preoccupied with being awestruck by Root (of all people) right now.

“No, I just, I read the paper you wrote on information technology management for Nathan Ingram’s class last year, and I—”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Root interrupts, not unkindly.

“Oh, sorry. It’s Claire, Claire Mahoney. Anyway, like I was saying, I was just really…”

Shaw steps back from the podium and tries to get Root’s attention to let her know that she should really be going outside and trying to round up their judges, but Root’s too busy nodding patiently down at Claire and getting her ego stroked.

Shaw crosses her arms and eyeballs the height difference between the two geeks (and are they really sure that Claire is an IFT student, because she looks all of 16 at _most_ ) and tries not to think about the fact that it probably looks similarly ridiculous whenever she’s standing next to Root too.

When she finally manages to catch Root’s attention by tapping on her watch, Root holds up a finger as if to signify that she should _wait._ Shaw chews on the inside of her cheek and stews, watching Root deftly maneuver Claire into sitting herself and the rest of her team down with a well-timed smile or two.

Shaw turns around and yanks the projector screen down when Root finally comes up and joins her, but lets go a bit too soon and the screen flies up. She stares angrily up at the cord, only _just_ out of her reach now, and steadfastly ignores Root standing next to her.

“Suave,” Root murmurs good-naturedly, before easily grasping the cord and pulling the screen back down.

“I was just… testing the elasticity,” Shaw says sulkily. “You know, in case other idiots get the bright idea to meddle with things up here.”

She looks up at Root to see her smiling fondly down at her, and feels her irritation growing.

“Sure,” Root says easily. “And if you’re ever in the mood to test the elasticity of… other things,” she reaches forward to brush Shaw’s hair back behind her ear unnecessarily, “You know where to find me.”

Shaw rolls her eyes and heads outside the room, looking around for her team and wondering why none of the judges were in the room yet. They were going to fall behind schedule. And why were so many participants already here for their presentations when they weren’t scheduled for another hour at least? These kids needed to chill out. It was barely even 9 a.m., didn’t these keeners want to sleep in?

“Give it up, Root,” she finally says when she hears Root join her. “I’m not like everyone else you flirt with. Whatever you want out of me, you’re not getting it.”

The look Root responds with is only slightly pouty, but mostly it says: _Oh, honey. I only flirt with people who want me to flirt with them_.

“Whatever,” Shaw huffs. “I don’t have time to deal with you today. Where’s Greenfield? Why is it so crowded and noisy in here already?”

Root leans on the door and fits herself snugly behind Shaw. “Someday you’ll see, Sameen,” she all but purrs next to Shaw’s ear. “The capacitance we’ve got between us… it can filter out all this noise.”

Turning around to look Root squarely in the eye, Shaw can’t help an exasperated laugh from escaping. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Don’t you mean… _ohm_ -believable?” Root asks mischievously, eyelashes fluttering.

“Wow… _wow_. You are such a geek,” Shaw complains.

Root lifts an eyebrow, unfazed. “It’s the age of the geek, sweetie.”

Torn between wanting to bury her face in her hands to hide her laughter and trying to strangle Root for her shamelessness, Shaw compromises by stalking away to look for those goddamn judges, with the sound of Root’s dorky little giggles following her.

 

* * *

 

 

“You know, we could have opened a Google Doc or something,” Shaw mutters uncomfortably. “We don’t need to get started on the post-event report together. In fact, we still have tomorrow left, so we don’t even need to work on it right now.”

“But then I wouldn’t be able to get any… private lessons,” Root says, already sprawled out on Shaw’s bed with their notes scattered around her.

Shaw pauses, pan in one hand and spatula in the other. Root smiles innocently up at her, appreciating the most impressive stink-eye she’s seen come from Shaw yet.

“Yeah? You get up here and make dinner then,” Shaw grits out.

“Oh no,” Root says, letting her head fall back on the bed. “There isn’t enough space to fit in there with you. Besides, I like it here. On your bed.”

Root first thinks the frown on Shaw’s face and lack of quick retort is in response to Root’s alarmingly increasing disregard for all traces of nuance, but then she notes the slight tightness in Shaw’s shoulders and winces. Sitting up, she clears her throat, but Shaw beats her to it as she turns back to her stove.

“Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t want you accidentally breaking the few things I’ve got in here anyway.”

Root casts an appraising eye around the small studio apartment, noting the efficient maximization of space. She pauses on a small stack of letters, written in a clearly juvenile hand, on Shaw’s nightstand. Briefly struggling with herself, Root decides not to reach over and read them.

She looks back up at Shaw to see that she’s been caught looking at the letters. Root quickly turns back to her laptop, but she knows her face looks guilty. To her surprise, Shaw turns the stove low and comes over to sit on the other end of the bed.

“Those are from Gen,” Shaw says after a moment.

Root nods, still pretending to be focused on the report.

Shaw falls back and looks up at the ceiling before continuing. “Finch kind of took her in. He got her into that boarding school and got me to sort of talk some sense into her once in a while, because he knew I got into IFT on scholarships and had to work my ass off.”

Watching Shaw’s fingers idly playing with the corners of the bedspread, Root nods again, but Shaw isn’t looking at her.

“After a while, I don’t know, Gen started thinking I was like her friend or something. And she kept talking about me to him. Then next thing I knew, he was on my case about transferring to engineering. I got called into his office twice a week for a month, before he finally…” Shaw pauses and shrugs. “He told me he knew I was capable, and that I wouldn’t let him down, which is why he was pushing so hard.”

Root exhales quietly. From the look on Shaw’s face, she wasn’t accustomed to that level of trust being put in her by other people, and it makes her uncomfortable.

Somehow, Root knows Shaw isn’t really looking for any of her input on any of this, so she stays quiet. So many of her questions are being answered right now, and she didn’t even have to go rooting around for them. In fact, this was a whole lot easier than her usual methods of learning about other people.

Shaw finally sits up, still not looking at Root. There’s a mild level of discomfort settling over them, before Shaw gets up and turns the stove off.

“Anyway,” she says, reaching for some plates. “Food’s ready.”

They eat quietly, before Root sets her fork down.

Shaw looks up at her curiously, but doesn’t stop eating. Root smiles a little at that, comforted by the idea that Shaw’s eating habits are probably one thing that will never change, no matter how awkward the situation.

“So,” Root begins. “As it turns out, you’re not Harold’s only pet project.”

Shaw chews on that for a bit, then swallows. “I’m guessing you’re not talking about John.”

Grinning, Root thinks about asking, but then focuses on what she was going to talk about. She can ask another time. But she knew it. She knew there was a reason her new knuckle dragging friend had always been hanging around.

“I had a… friend once. Hanna,” Root says instead. She sees Shaw pause, then set her fork down to give Root her full attention. Surprised, Root blinks, but Shaw’s face is inscrutable.

“When we were growing up, neither of us had very much money at all.” Root looks around Shaw’s place, thinking about the sense of familiarity that had struck her when she’d first walked in and taken in the sense of _crowdedness_ , even though everything clearly had a purpose and a place and tried not to take up as much space as possible.

“There was a career presentation day once, and one boy’s father came in and talked about being an engineer, and he—” Root pauses, wracking her brain to try to remember what it was that had inspired Hanna. “Uh, he said a lot of things about… something. Anyway, Hanna wanted to become an engineer. She wanted to change the world.”

Shaw’s eyes are dark and still as unreadable as ever, taking in the faintly bittersweet tone of Root’s voice.

“Hanna worked day and night to make it to college. She was determined to be a scholarship student, like you,” Root says, a little wanly. “But no matter how hard she tried, she just didn’t have the grades for it… but she never gave up.”

Root fidgets with her plate, turning it around in front of her. “So… I started making money so that she could go. I was always good with computers, and I started putting it to—well, not _good_ use. It was usually mostly located somewhere outside of the law.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Root can see Shaw nodding, as if she’d wondered how Root had had so much money, but this time it’s her turn to not be able to look directly across at the other person. “All throughout high school, Hanna was my only friend. Nobody else knew, but I think on some level, they _knew_. That I was involved in things that were so much bigger than the games of phone tag they were playing with their crushes.”

A faint snort escapes Shaw, and Root smiles a little in agreement, before hesitating.

“After Hanna was gone,” she says quietly, knowing that Shaw is aware of what she means and refusing to delve further into it right now if not, “I graduated alone. I had more money than I knew what to do with, and the person it was all for never even had the chance to be there with me.”

“So you ended up here,” Shaw says softly. It’s the first time she’s spoken since Root started, and it’s almost as if she’s trying to make an effort to let Root know… _something_.

Root nods. “Old habits die hard, apparently,” she says wryly, “And Finch caught me poking around in some of his _highly_ controversial new research into AI.” She shakes her head at Shaw’s unasked question, adding, “I never found out exactly what it was, but… I’m trying to.”

A half-smile peeks through, and Root meets Shaw’s gaze. “So _that’s_ why I’m here. He promised me that I could work with him if, and only if, I got my act together and learned how normal members of society function. So just like you, he’s trying to get me to make friends, and not by hacking into their records. By talking, or something,” she says dismissively.

They both grin a bit, at each other, united by their mutual dislike of trifling conversation, but remain mostly lost in thought without speaking for long moments.

Finally, Shaw picks up her fork deliberately. “If you ask me,” she says, before popping a forkful in her mouth and talking around it, “Not that I’m an expert or anything, but you seem to have it mostly figured out. The talking to people part, anyway.” Shaw rolls her eyes a bit, clearly referencing Root’s uncanny ability to be able to flirt with anything that moved.

“Besides,” she adds around another mouthful, “Who wants to live a boring, safe life anyway? It just sounds like you need to get better at hiding your tracks from Finch.”

Root shrugs, but before she can respond, a loud clap of thunder interrupts.

Crossing to the window to investigate, Root notes with dismay that her brand new motorcycle is currently being intensely rained on. The sound of the weather channel on the television makes her turn, and she and Shaw both scowl at the weatherman informing them of a tropical depression passing through.

Although gloomy and hardly uplifting, the storm oddly seems to be dissipating most of the heaviness in the room, but there are still faint traces of something weighty in the atmosphere. Shaw turns off the television and comes to stand next to Root by the window, grimacing outside.

Root sets herself against the windowsill with her back to the window, studying Shaw instead. “Well,” she says, lightly. “Looks like we have some time to kill.”

Shaw peers distrustfully up at her from under her eyelashes.

“Which we can spend working on the post-event report, of course,” Root adds. “Unless… there’s something else you can think of that we could do to pass the time.”

Shaw scowls halfheartedly in response, but her eyes are studying Root’s lips and her hands are settling on the windowsill on either side of Root, bracketing Root against Shaw’s glacial approach.

Root lets a small smile curve onto her lips, enjoying the way Shaw’s eyes are fixated, but also waits for Shaw to meet her gaze. She leans back just by a hair’s breadth and tilts her head up, urging Shaw to look up.

Instead, Shaw’s attention drops down to her exposed throat, and Root suppresses a shiver at the rawness in Shaw’s expression, suddenly aware of how vulnerably unprotected her neck is.

Root swallows thickly, trying to find her words, but then Shaw finally blinks. The two of them stay frozen in place, but the hunger in Shaw’s eyes has now been masked by her standard show of mild defensiveness.

“I suppose you could stay here,” Shaw mutters reluctantly. “If the storm doesn’t let up.”

Root nods, feeling as though she’s waiting for something more from Shaw, unsure if she wants the gap between them to just finally be closed once and for all, or if she needs Shaw to raise her hackles the way she always does and spin away so Root can stop feeling so off kilter.

“I don’t have a lot of space, though,” Shaw finally says.

“I’m sure your bed is big enough for the two of us,” Root replies quietly, feeling almost as though Shaw might spook like a wrathful, jumpy cat.

To her immense disappointment, Shaw stays frozen, _still_ staring resolutely at everything – from her jawline to the tongue that pokes out to wet her lips – but Root’s eyes, and Root almost can’t stand it anymore.

Her fingers twitch, hanging limply as her hands dangle at her sides, and she considers what the span of Shaw’s back might feel like. They twitch again, and Root can just picture lifting Shaw’s chin to force their eyes to meet. Once more, and Root is steeling herself to end Shaw’s indecisiveness.

Before she gets the chance, Shaw makes her decision, and steps back abruptly.

“If you try anything,” Shaw says, and if nothing else, Root is gratified that her voice is wavering and hoarse, “I will snap your neck.”

And with that, Shaw almost stumbles as she turns away to clear up the dishes from dinner.

Root is careful not to telegraph anything on her face, even though Shaw is making a concerted effort to keep facing away as she bustles about. Slowly, Root turns back around to the window, tapping her fingers on the windowsill restlessly, and listens to the unfiltered noise of the rain outside.


	10. Competition day 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> attn: the rating has changed (finallyyy), but if that's not your thing then you can basically just skim through the entire last part because everything is 100% shameless and gratuitous. ♫ ┌༼ຈل͜ຈ༽┘ ♪

“Has anyone seen Root?”

Everyone’s heads shake no, and Shaw huffs. _Honestly_ , she thinks grumpily. _Being in charge just means always needing to track people down_.

“Maybe try upstairs?” Reese suggests, lifting his head up from the notes he’s making for Finch. “I think she said something about sitting in on the innovative design presentations.”

“Figures,” Shaw mutters. “Here we all are, working and compiling scores to find out who the winners were, and she’s just lounging around.”

None of her VPs say anything (wisely), because her last caffeine intake was six hours ago and she’d barely gotten any sleep all night.

She’d tossed and turned all night instead, listening to the storm outside and staring daggers at the back of Root’s head every time Root’s foot twitched in her sleep and kicked her lightly. To her credit, though, Root hadn’t tried anything, so even though Shaw had wanted to snap her neck after the third sleep-kick, there hadn’t been a reason to.

Then they’d both overslept their alarms, and so neither of them had had the time to even grab anything for breakfast when rushing over on Root’s bike this morning.

Shaw grabs a pizza box with a few slices left in it before heading up the stairs to the presentation room.

“Carter, you’re in charge till I come back with Root,” Shaw calls over her shoulder. She hears a mildly indignant splutter come from Greenfield, but Greenfield is Root’s favourite, not hers.

Shaw takes out a slice of cold pizza and munches on it, thinking dark thoughts about how dumb it is that _she_ wasn’t the one ordered by Finch to learn how to socialize with other humans, and yet _Root_ is the one with everyone wrapped around her pinky finger.

“Excuse me, do you know where—” a lost-looking first-year asks, spotting the IFTEC nametag Root had pinned on her this morning before they’d arrived.

“No,” Shaw answers shortly, and keeps walking till she gets to the room Root’s supposed to be in.

She peers in through the windows, before quietly opening the door and slipping inside from the back of the room. Shaw scans the scarcely populated room a few times, looking for a single brunette head, but can’t seem to find her. Shaw looks around again, and finally spots what might be the back of Root’s head.

Sitting next to… Martine, unless there’s another tall blonde in engineering who also puts her hair up in excessively severe buns and sits like there’s a gigantic caliper rammed up her—

 “In conclusion, our objective was to design a low-cost, intelligent wireless sound pressure level-monitoring device that can be housed in hands-free, over-the-ear noise protection earphones or…”

The presenter at the front is clearly nervous, and it sounds like he’s been droning non-stop for the last twenty minutes. Shaw doesn’t think she’s heard him pause to take a breath since she entered the room. An earpiece, his team made a smart earpiece, why couldn’t he just say that?

Debating over whether or not she should just slip back out the door and leave, Shaw eventually makes her way to the row just behind Root and Martine and quietly sets the pizza box down on the table out of their reach, in case they turn around. She puts her feet up and helps herself to another slice, wondering why Martine is even in here to begin with.

As the presenter wraps up and the judges applaud politely, Shaw’s eyes narrow in front of her as Martine’s head tilts towards Root’s to say something quietly.

Shaw keeps her feet propped up and posture relaxed, even though she wants to lean forward to hear what they’re talking about.

Root raises her hand, and the presenter calls on her. “Could you go back to the slide you had with the illustrations for the arc sensor you’d use for the mold?”

Martine leans over to whisper something else in Root’s ear as they study the graphs, and Root nods absently in response.

Shaw’s suspicious now. Earlier she’d thought maybe Martine was just being a pest, or trying to find some way to sneak into a better placing in the categories she competed in, but now it looks like she and Root might be _colluding_ on something.

It couldn’t be a capstone design project, since Martine was in her program and Root was in a different one. Maybe something illegal. What if Martine was a criminal, too?

That wouldn’t surprise her.

Nonchalance abandoned, Shaw inches forward, careful not to move too quickly in case they notice her out of the edges of their vision.

“And _speaking_ of nice arc lengths…” she hears Martine say with an undercurrent of innuendo and a less-than-subtle once-over that she could’ve expected to come from Root. Shaw can’t help the snort of disgust that escapes her. Of _course_ Root is hitting on Martine, too, and this might be the most unforgivable thing Root has done to Shaw yet.

She sits back in her chair quickly and stares at the half-eaten crust in her hand when they both start at the sound.

“Sameen,” Root says in surprise.

“Hello, Shaw,” Martine says evenly.

Shaw nods at them indifferently, then crams in a large bite of her pizza. There’s a pause where they wait for her to explain why she’s here, but Shaw just keeps staring Martine down (literally, the seating is inclined in this room) as she eats.

“How’s everything going?” Root asks eventually.

Shaw shrugs, still silent.

Root nods thoughtfully, then sees the pizza box. “Oh, is that for me?” she asks brightly. “That’s so thoughtful of you, I didn’t get a—”

“Nope,” Shaw says, pulling the box into herself possessively as she stands up now that the presentation is done. She starts crab-walking her way out of the row.

“What did bring you here, then, Shaw?” Martine asks, making to follow her out, to Shaw’s displeasure.

“Nothing. I just wanted to wrap this up,” Shaw says, gesturing at them with the last bite of her crust, then hastily adding, “The presentation. It’s running behind schedule.”

“Ah,” Root says after a moment. “The competition schedule.”

“That’s right,” Shaw says shortly. “I was worried about the competition.”

Martine looks between the two of them, and the smirk on her face is altogether far too knowing for Shaw to feel comfortable with. There isn’t even anything to _know_ , so… Martine is just… weird. Who knows why she does the things she does.

 _Well, Root might_ , Shaw thinks darkly, looking down at their feet and noting how there’s much less space between Root and Martine than there is between herself and Root. Although some of that may have to do with the fact that Shaw is doing her best to stomp around in a way that nobody passing by might be able to mistake for the three of them all walking together.

“Well,” Martine finally says, when it’s apparent that neither Shaw nor Root have anything else to say, “I’ll see you soon, Root.”

Root waves goodbye with a small smile, and Martine departs without so much as an acknowledging glance down at Shaw. Rolling her eyes, Shaw spins on her heel and makes her way back downstairs where everyone else is working hard and not being suspicious or in cahoots with terrible people.

She briefly considers just asking Root what the heck is up with being able to tolerate sharing the same air as Martine, much less having conversations with her, but then she remembers that she doesn’t care.

“We’re not done working yet,” Shaw calls irritably without turning around to see if Root’s following.

Not _yet_. There’s still about an hour or two of work left to be put in before this competition is over and done with.

Shaw can hear Root’s footsteps padding softly behind her.

“Where’s Bear? There’s a slice left in here calling his name,” she asks Reese, when they get back to the group. She doesn’t look at Root, who’s poking around hopefully in the pile of empty pizza boxes.

“Finch already came and picked him up,” Zoe supplies.

Shaw can feel Root’s pathetic stare boring into the back of her head. “Anyone else want any more pizza?” she asks her team. They all look doubtfully between her and Root, then shake their heads in unison and bury themselves back in their work.

Heaving a sigh, Shaw turns to Root and holds out the box. Root slowly walks over to Shaw as if she’s got all the time in the world, with that same stupid smug smirk on her face.

Shaw drops the box on the table and goes to sit at the other end.

 

* * *

 

 

“Last round!” Carter cheers.

“Who are we drinking to?” Greenfield yells.

“Us!” Zoe cries, holding her shot of tequila up in the air.

Reese smiles and sips at his bright green midori sour, ordered for him by Zoe, who had told him in no uncertain terms that she expected him to take her home and so he may as well have a drink while he waited.

The rest of them are all at least eight shots deep, but Root thinks maybe she and Shaw snuck a few extra shots together when nobody else was looking a while ago. She can’t really remember, but it doesn’t really matter. The first thing she did when they arrived was open up a tab, and everything’s going to be taken care of. Everything is fine.

Catching Shaw’s eye, Root licks deliberately at the back of her hand, enjoying the way Shaw’s dark stare fixates on her, then slides off her stool to press up against Shaw’s back and hold out her hand for salting. It doesn’t escape the notice of either of them that the height of the barstool has Shaw’s face positioned just lower than Root’s, and Root ducks her head down and presses her mouth against Shaw’s shoulder as a lime is pushed into her hand.

Shaw turns and smirks when she sees the unsteady step Root takes backward against the neighboring bar stool as she tries to decide what takes priority, not falling over or not spilling her shot.

“You ready?” Shaw asks, voice low and tone promising.

 _It’s not fair_ , Root thinks as she nods and wonders why she had to work to get her perfectly-attuned, somewhat-invested-but-not-too-much double entendres just right, but every other thing Shaw says to her can sound like an effortless come-on when she’s in a good mood.

“Watch behind you,” Shaw adds.

 _Maybe it’s just me_ , Root realizes ruefully, considering how something as benign as Shaw expressing the faintest, slightest, barely noticeable amount of concern for her can get a rise out of her too.

At any rate, she doesn’t care about any of that. Not when Shaw’s eyes are hooded like that and she’s not making any effort to avoid meeting Root’s gaze.

They take their shot and grimace. Shaw’s hands make pincer motions as she reaches for what remains of Root’s lime once she casts aside her own.

Root watches Shaw place her lips in the exact same places Root’s had been just seconds ago, fascinated. Her eyes dart between the intriguing movements of Shaw’s mouth as she sucks on the lime, and the nebulously straightforward stare Shaw’s leveling at her.

“Maybe we should drink to the fact that you two didn’t kill each other,” Greenfield says loudly, suddenly draping one arm over Root and Shaw each as he pokes his head in between theirs with a dopey grin for Root and a cheesy wink for Shaw.

The look they both give him causes him to recoil and pull his face back within seconds.

“Or me,” he adds, laughing sheepishly as Zoe and Carter and even Reese giggle from their safe, distanced vantage point.

But the moment, tenuous as ever, is gone now, and Shaw’s meticulously wiping up spills on the bar counter and stacking shot glasses with a nervous, focused energy radiating off her. Root watches her for a moment, feeling as though a million thoughts are whirling around, but she can’t pinpoint just one to hold down.

“I have to pee,” she suddenly decides, when the most pressing thought makes itself known. Her happy, drunk group of friends (how odd) wave her away, wishing her safe travels to the bathrooms downstairs.

As Root washes her hands, she stares into the mirror. Her makeup seems fine. Hair normal. Shirt… still on. So why does it feel like every nerve ending has been agitated, and there’s a chill running through her bones that has nothing to do with the flush on her cheeks?

When Root emerges from the lower floor and tries to rejoin the group by the bar, she halts momentarily, confused. The group is nowhere to be found, and she didn’t think she spent _that_ long in the bathroom.

She finally spots Shaw, almost lost in a new crowd of strangers, talking to… an extremely pretty Asian girl.

Root’s eyes narrow, and she pushes through the crowd to get back to Shaw.

“Who’s your friend, Sameen?” Root asks, careful not to do anything that Shaw might find overtly objectionable, like settling her arm around Shaw’s waist or playing with her hair. Instead, she looks the girl up and down appreciatively, and revels in the apprehensive look on Shaw’s face.

“Kelli,” the girl smiles, holding out her hand for Root to shake. Root holds onto it just a second longer than necessary, and looks slyly over at Shaw, whose half-lidded eyes are nearly unreadable save for the shrewdly piercing look she’s giving Root right now.

“It was nice meeting you, Kelli,” Shaw says, not breaking eye contact with Root, “But I think we’re going to go join our friends outside.”

“Oh, is that where everyone went?” Root asks, but she doesn’t think she was heard, because Shaw just grasps her hand and pulls her through the bar.

Shaw’s grip is hot and firm, and Root amuses herself as she’s getting dragged along by squeezing Shaw’s hand for no reason. She tries to remember Morse code, but then doesn’t have anything to say in Morse code anyway, so she just starts squeezing along to the beat of the song thudding through the speakers overhead.

They both let out a sharp gasp when they step outside into the cold brisk air. Root looks around, but the others are still nowhere to be found.

“Greenfield got sick and they took him home,” Shaw says, as if reading Root’s thoughts. “They said they’d see us at the awards ceremony next week, if not before.”

They both look blearily at Root’s motorcycle, parked outside the bar, and Root gently tugs at Shaw to keep her from climbing on.

She still hasn’t let go of Root’s hand even though there aren’t any other people around to get lost in anymore, and she’s still watching Root with the same direct, unblinking stare she’s been giving her since their second or third shot.

Root stares back, then sticks out her other hand to hail down a cab.

They clamber into the backseat, hands still clasped, and Shaw slides down to the middle seat after Root, pressing up close. Her other hand comes up and she gently tugs down on Root’s lower lip with her thumb as Root gives the driver her address.

Root’s breathing hitches when Shaw drags her thumbnail down Root’s chin and neck, settling over her pulse point. Shaw’s lips are curving into a smile as she looks down and sees the faint scratches being left, and Root has to force herself to remember to breathe when one of Shaw’s legs intertwines with her own and insistently presses their knees together.

Thinking back to the previous night, Root slides one hand lightly up over Shaw’s back, fingers splayed, before bringing it up to gently grasp Shaw’s chin, and this time Shaw doesn’t hesitate to meet her gaze. They keep staring at each other, unblinking, tacitly daring the other to make the next move.

The cab stops in front of Root’s building, and Shaw wets her lips and swallows dryly.

For one heart stopping second, Root is terrified. She pays as quickly as she can, fumblingly one-handed, right hand still intertwined with Shaw’s left, but to her relief, Shaw doesn’t extricate her hand from Root’s grip and lets herself be pulled out of the cab with her.

They stand there for a moment as their cab drives off, with Shaw standing on the curb, and Root standing just off of it. They’re still holding hands, and Shaw keeps turning her hand over to look at their interlinked fingers.

“Are you coming up with me?” Root eventually asks.

Shaw lets their hands drop and smirks at Root. “Where else am I going to sleep, on the street?”

Comforted by Shaw’s familiarly acerbic tone, if slightly slurred from the alcohol, Root laughs. “Alright,” she says, but she remains rooted where she is when Shaw moves to enter the building.

Shaw looks back inquisitively, only to be slowly pulled back to the edge of the curb by Root.

Root curls her other hand up the small of Shaw’s back, bringing their faces bare inches from each other. The smell of the tequila and limes radiating off of both of them is overpowering, but the solid, pleasant scent unique to Shaw fills Root’s nose.

Shaw tilts her head ever so slightly, and waits. Root laughs quietly again, recognizing the distinct look of challenge in Shaw’s expression, and cups Shaw’s cheek.

Closing the gap between them in determined, faltering, cautious motions, Root kisses her, with one foot propped up on the sidewalk, one foot still standing on the deserted street, and their hands clasped tight at 3:06 a.m.

 

* * *

 

 

Root fastidiously drops her shirt and pants in the laundry hamper before turning back around to face the bed. With a curtain of hair falling over one eye, Shaw can’t quite make out the expression on Root’s face, but there’s no mistaking the intent with which Root is approaching her.

Shaw lets herself get pushed back onto Root’s bed, and she lands with a soft thump, fully clothed, staring up at Root’s hair and bra and long expanses of skin as they descend and surround her.

Root hovers over her, motionless, for a long moment, almost as if she’s trying to commit every single detail to memory.

“What’s the matter, Root?” Shaw’s voice is taunting. “All talk and no action?”

Root smiles down at her, fondly. It brings a delicious, familiar irritation to boil in Shaw, and Shaw does her best to maintain her sneer up at the maddeningly affectionate look on Root’s face.

But then before Shaw can even blink, Root’s lips are bruising against hers, while Root’s fingers scrape and tug and strip away at Shaw’s clothes. Shaw lets herself be pulled up to get her tank top and bra off, then flips them over and holds Root down by the throat while she kicks her pants off.

Dragging her mouth down to the space between her thumb and her fingers, Shaw gnaws gently at Root’s Adam’s apple, pleased to hear a stifled intake of breath come from Root. She shivers when she feels Root’s fingers running so lightly over the sensitive backs of her arms, so lightly that they almost feel like ghosts, and she bites down at the junction where Root’s neck meets her shoulder in response.

Her lips gently run over the marks she leaves, fingers splayed across Root’s stomach and caressing lightly, amused at how easy it is to manipulate Root’s breathing as she hears it reach a steady – elevated, but steady – rate.

Shaw pushes herself back up, capturing Root’s lips insistently, dictating their pacing with her tongue and teeth, gripping Root’s hips firmly and digging her fingers in. Root’s hips are undulating, already seeking friction, and Shaw slowly lowers one leg between Root’s thighs.

Just as Root’s hips rise up to meet Shaw’s thigh, Shaw pulls her leg back and jerks Root’s face to the side with one hand to bite at an earlobe.

The sharp replying hiss and beginnings of a restrained moan are drawn out, and Shaw runs her tongue along the cartilage, exhaling into the conch of Root’s ear and drinking in her own warm, heady breath, reverberating back.

Root’s hands are scrabbling now, trying to pull Shaw down against her, but Shaw wiggles and refuses. Instead, she slides her hands under Root, and deftly flips them over with one knee crooked so that Root slides down along her thigh with a clenched jaw and a reluctant _fuck_ exhaled.

Shaw stares up at Root, pulling at her bottom lip with her teeth, entranced by the way one half of Root’s hair is cascading down along her chest, and the other half has been mussed and peeks out from behind her back.

After settling Root’s hips in place so that she can feel the hot, damp pressure against her pelvis, Shaw rests her arms above her head, pulling her hair up and out of her face, and smirks up at Root.

The _want_ shining through the storminess in Root’s eyes, which Shaw could have sworn were light brown but seem to be consumed by dark pupils right now, causes Shaw to lick her lips slowly, just to see it magnify and multiply.

“Do what you do best, Root,” Shaw suggests with a smile, but the edges are tinged to make it sound like an order. “Drive me crazy.”

Root laughs, eyes still only half-open, and slides her fingers into Shaw’s hair. Shaw hisses at the tight grip, and drags her nails along Root’s thighs.

Root palms one breast, thumb and forefinger idly toying with the nipple on Shaw’s other breast, before lowering herself slowly down.

Shaw lifts herself up by the neck just the slightest to meet Root in another kiss, but at the last second, Root slides to the side and mischievously busses Shaw’s cheek instead.

“You talk too much, sweetie,” Root whispers, and Shaw can feel her heart thumping under Root’s hot, comforting palm, infuriated by that aggravating term of endearment.

“Maybe,” she growls, “You don’t talk _enough_.”

Root pulls herself back up to look down at Shaw, one eyebrow quirked, and they both snicker at the absurdity of Root ever being considered _reticent_.

Root rolls her hips once, and Shaw’s mouth goes dry at the wetness she can feel along her hip. Her hands drift down, and Root lifts herself up so Shaw can slide her middle finger down the length of Root above her underwear. Soon her other fingers join in, and Root’s breaths blow into Shaw’s ear, hot and uneven.

“Sameen,” Root murmurs.

Shaw stays where she is, on her back with Root’s torso pressed against hers, fingers teasing and dancing along Root’s inner thighs. She wants to hear Root say her name again, so she lifts up Root’s hair and bites down on Root’s shoulder before lightly toying with the edges of Root’s underwear.

“ _Sameen_ ,” Root says, frustration coloring her voice now.

“Yes, Root?” she asks, extremely gratified to hear it coming out calmly and evenly, as though they’re just having a normal conversation on the phone with each other about the weather. “Is there something you want from me?”

Root laughs, then slides downwards with a slight huff.

She flicks at Shaw’s nipple with her tongue, making a note of the high sensitivity with a devilish grin as she comes back up for a hard, wet kiss ending in Root’s teeth pulling Shaw’s bottom lip to the point where Shaw’s head comes up off the bed to follow.

“I like you like this,” Root breathes, sliding back down and checking to make sure there wasn’t a single spot she’d missed kissing or licking along Shaw’s body, oversaturating Shaw’s nipples with attention till the excess sensation nearly makes her scream at Root to move on. “But I think I’d like to hear you beg.”

Shaw bites down on her lip and scowls stubbornly when Root fiddles with her nipple one last time, but can’t hold back her gasp once her underwear is yanked down and Root immediately laps at her with her tongue, wide and flat and _slow_.

“More,” she groans, letting Root spread her apart none-too-gently when she accidentally catches Root in the arm as she kicks her underwear off and out of the way.

“There we go,” Root says, muffled, and that hauntingly smug tone makes Shaw ball her fists in Root’s sheets as fingers and lips and tongue all blur together till Shaw loses feeling in her fingertips and pulls at Root’s hair when she reaches her climax.

Instead of coming back up to kiss her, Root sits back on the bed, watching Shaw’s chest heave in the aftermath.

“Come here,” Shaw says impatiently, eager to wipe that stupid dopey grin off her face.

“In a minute,” Root replies, still looking her over in a way that makes Shaw feel entirely self-conscious and completely secure all at once.

“Root,” Shaw says, clipped and precise.

Smirking, Root crawls over to kiss her, and Shaw indulges her briefly, but then breaks the kiss by turning her head and gesturing for Root to keep moving up.

“Grab the headboard,” she says lazily, enjoying the look of realization on Root’s face.

She can tell Root wants to say something, but doesn’t quite know what, so instead Shaw reaches up, tugs Root’s underwear down as Root crawls up over her, and says, “Bet I can make you come faster.”

“It’s not a competition, Sameen—” comes Root’s amused voice from above her, but the end of Shaw’s name gets caught in Root’s throat once she’s pulled down and Shaw’s tongue flicks at her clit.

“Oh,” Root says, grinding down involuntarily and leaning into the headboard for support, even as Shaw’s arms encircle her waist and tug downwards emphatically.

Shaw wants to hear Root say her name again, so she sucks hard until she can feel Root’s legs trembling on either side of her. The sounds coming from Root could be any combination of the usual suspects as far as words during sex go, but she thinks she can hear her name mixed in once or twice, so she relaxes the suction gradually until it seems like Root can hold herself up again.

She waits until Root leans back, enough for them to make brief eye contact, before she locks her arms to keep Root into place, driving her to orgasm and prolonging it despite Root’s squirming, until finally Root pushes Shaw’s head down into the bed and rolls off.

“Told you,” Shaw says smugly, rolling onto her side and assessing Root, feeling thoroughly impressed with herself.

Root half-laughs, half-sobs, shaking her head and staying collapsed on the bed. “You should come with a GHS warning label.”

Shaw raises her eyebrows, not seeing the corny set-up until it’s too late.

“Because that was… _explosive_.”

Shaw groans and rolls onto her face. After a moment, she says, muffled into the bedspread, “That’s not a bad thing.”

Root grins and wiggles over, waiting till Shaw looks up before planting a peck on her lips. “Not bad at all, but it could be dangerous in inexperienced hands. Then again, practice makes perfect,” she says, with shining eyes and a figuratively bushy tail to match.

Shaw turns her face back down to the bed, uncomfortably trying to figure out why the conversation she was about to start had to happen _now_. Normally the people she slept with were either very recently introduced to and therefore very familiar with her non-dating rules, or they probably found out after the time limit had exceeded and Shaw stopped returning their messages.

“Sam?” Root asks, nudging her with her shoulder. “Was that last one too much? Did I kill you?”

Shaw sighs heavily and rolls over, loathe to ruin either of their afterglows. She stares up at the ceiling, because looking into Root’s transparent, eager eyes is just too much right now. “As far as practice goes…” she starts.

She feels, rather than sees, Root prop herself up on one elbow, watching her.

“You remember how I do things, right? Usually just one night, maybe three, and then that’s it.” Her words are coming out flat and curt, and she chances a glimpse at Root’s face.

She actually can’t see much, since the light from the window is coming from behind and the planes of the shadows are cutting across, but what she _can_ see of Root’s face looks… normal.

“I remember,” Root says easily, and her voice sounds… normal, too.

Shaw squints up at her, but Root looks exactly the same as she always does. Not as obviously sated as she had looked just seconds before, but all the same mixtures of teasing and coolness and affection are still there.

“Okay,” Shaw says. “Good.”

She doesn’t know how she had expected this to go, but… it somehow hadn’t been like _this_. But this was perfectly normal and pretty much the best case scenario, so Shaw sits up and starts looking for her clothes.

“If you’re looking for something to throw on, there’s a pretty wide array to select from over there,” Root says helpfully, indicating a walk-in closet nearly the size of Shaw’s apartment.

“Thanks, but I think our matrix dimensions are just slightly different,” Shaw says dryly, before freezing, aghast. Now Root has her making dumb nerdy puns, too.

She decides to forego finding her missing sock and instead makes sure she has everything she needs… keys, wallet, phone…

Root sits up, watching Shaw quickly dress herself. “Are you leaving?”

Still looking for her jacket, Shaw shrugs. “I really need a shower,” she says unconvincingly.

She turns around and catches a glimmer of – something – on Root’s face, before it quickly disappears. She doesn’t know what it was, but even if Root’s looking at her now with patient exasperation and not something else that looks vaguely strange and concerning, her resolve to leave is further strengthened.

“Sameen,” Root says after a moment, voice serious.

Shaw sighs, hand already resting on Root’s bedroom door. “What?”

“I’m going to give you cab fare to get home. Don’t argue with me, just take it. Please.”

Shaw blinks again. She’s probably still a bit drunk. That must be why she's having no luck predicting what Root might say tonight.

“Fine,” she says.

Root nods, crossing from her nightstand to press a bill into Shaw’s hand, unashamed of her nakedness. Walking to Root’s front door with all her clothes on, Shaw feels unbelievably awkward, as if everything that had just happened tonight had been a strange dream.

Then Root gently pulls her in for one last kiss, and Shaw doesn’t know where to put her hands, so she closes her eyes and feels her eyebrows furrowing. And then Shaw hears the door click and lock behind her with the feeling of Root’s lips still lingering on hers, as she makes her way home.


	11. +1 week later

“How’s your end coming along?” Root asks, eyes still trained on her laptop.

Shaw pauses her scribbling and checks her watch. “Almost done filling out this post-event form. Am I going to email thank-yous to all of the judges, or are you?”

“That’s me. You’ve got the rest of the judges’ gifts to distribute over next week.”

Shaw sneaks a glance at Root, at the way she’s biting her lip, at the studied look of concentration on her face. She looks exactly the same as she always does every time they end up studying or working together, and the idea that _something_ should seem _different_ won’t stop eating away at Shaw.

Root looks up at her. “Are you done?”

“Uh,” Shaw says, dropping her eyes back down to her paper. “Yeah, more or less. I’m going to go check and see how clean-up’s going.”

“Okay,” Root says, with a brief smile, before turning back to her screen.

Shaw closes the door to the meeting room quietly as she steps into the hallway. The memory of her walking down a similar hallway after leaving Root’s apartment last week pops into her mind, and annoyed, she detours from her path back to the awards ceremony venue to pilfer a can of soda from an unattended beverages cart.

Turning back around, she thinks she sees a glimpse of someone going into the room she just left, and she frowns. Walking back past the door, she casually peers into the window and sees Root grinning up at Martine, tossing her hair back as Martine perches on the table.

Shaw gulps her pop down, embracing the carbonated burn down her throat, and stalks back in her heels to where Zoe and Carter are supervising coat check as people leave.

Shaw hasn’t been mulling over the peculiar quality Root’s smiles have had ever since… the last day of the competition. She can’t quite put her finger on it, but they’ve been different somehow, because normally they’re supposed to look more like the silly simper she saw Root giving Martine just now.

Root’s still every bit as annoying, if not more, than before, but she hadn’t let one cheesy come-on slip out at all during their planning meeting earlier in the week, or even over the entire awards ceremony dinner tonight.

Shaw scratches uncomfortably at the strap of her dress digging into her back as she leans against the wall.

She wonders if Root’s reticence is because of that last comment Shaw had made before leaving, about needing to take a shower. It hadn’t been meant in a “gross, I need to cleanse myself of that entire ordeal” sense, but maybe Root had taken it that way.

Or maybe Root is completely on board with Shaw’s bed-partner philosophy, and is cooling it on the overt come-ons now that they’ve actually slept together. It wasn’t like Root had actually ever said anything about her own views on dating, Shaw realizes. So maybe all that ridiculous, over-the-top flirting is reserved for people she hasn’t slept with yet. Like… Martine.

Or maybe Shaw just hasn’t been keeping herself busy enough, and that’s why these garbage thoughts are polluting her brain right now in the aftermath of the competition weekend.

“Everything all done?”

Shaw tries to look like she hadn’t been startled by Reese’s sudden appearance next to her. “As done as it’s going to get.”

“Sorry I missed your speech,” Reese says.

Shaw shrugs. “You didn’t miss much.”

“Did you make sure to thank me and Finch for how essential we were?” Reese asks, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.

“As if,” Shaw says. “Root covered the thank-yous, so you can go ask her if she stood up and acknowledged that she needed _your_ help in front of hundreds of people.”

Reese smirks a bit. “Well… I was never in it for the recognition.”

They stand in companionable silence for a while, watching Greenfield run around the room, trying to remember where he’d left his jacket, as some of their volunteers move around and clean up some of the tables.

“So I’m guessing you got home okay,” Reese says casually after some time.

Shaw glares up at him. She doesn’t know where he’s going with this, or what he’s talking about, but she’s entirely distrustful of the too-friendly notes in his voice.

“After the bar last week,” he adds helpfully.

Shaw pushes herself off the wall and goes up to the podium to make sure the USB key with the presentation on it hadn’t been left behind. She rolls her eyes when she sees Reese following along behind her.

“Did you grab a cab with Root?” Reese asks.

Shaw levels a glare at him. “Speaking of which, what was up with you guys just taking off like that? We could’ve gotten a van and split it.”

Reese shrugs. “Jason was sick, we had to leave you two behind,” he says, and there’s a hint of cheekiness in his voice that causes Shaw to advance on him slowly until he’s up against the wall. It’s suddenly occurring to her that maybe Root hadn’t been that far off all those times she’d been disparaging of Reese.

“John,” she says quietly.

Reese smiles down at her. “Yes, Shaw?”

“John,” she repeats, tacking on, _You piece of shit_ , in her mind.

His entirely too self-satisfied grin is all the answer Shaw needs to her unspoken question, and she heaves an enormously aggravated sigh as she slouches heavily against the wall and wonders if there’s a way she could manage to throttle all three of her VPs and Reese at once.

“We’re in college,” Shaw bursts out, after a minute.

Reese nods thoughtfully.

“Well, _I’m_ in college,” Shaw amends.

“Yes,” Reese agrees.

“College is when we’re _supposed_ to be running around and not getting tied down.”

“Okay,” Reese agrees.

“What?” Shaw asks, getting the sense that Reese is just pacifying her.

Reese looks at her for a second, then appears to make up his mind and says, “College is also when a lot of people lie to themselves about their feelings.”

Balking, Shaw screws up her nose in disgust. “Feelings are useless. They just get in the way of things that are actually important.”

Reese considers this carefully for a moment, then gives her a crooked grin. “Are you saying they’re like a Faraday cage? Blocking out the important signals?”

Shaw wonders why it is that apparently everyone in her life is now fond of falling back onto terrible analogies and jokes. She tiredly raises her eyebrows. “Since when do you know about Faraday cages?”

“Zoe’s an electrical,” he shrugs.

Shaw smirks at that, tiredness dissipating. “So how long _exactly_ have you and Zoe been… special friends?”

“Are we talking about my feelings now?”

“We were never talking about mine,” Shaw returns.

“Well, Shaw,” he says, sounding amused, “I don’t see myself as being trapped in a Faraday cage of feelings, do you?”

Shaw makes a scoffing noise that she hopes Reese takes to mean _no_. He doesn’t say anything, but she can practically hear him smirking, so she’s relieved when he eventually pushes off the wall and goes to join Zoe, ready to go home.

Shaw tries to remember what she knows about Faraday cages.

“Hey,” comes a voice from above her, and Shaw is just absolutely not in the mood to put up with this right now.

“Hi, Tomas,” is all she says in response. Why is he still here? Everyone else already went home.

“So… it’s all over now,” he says. “Want to go get a drink to celebrate?”

Shaw smiles ruefully, remembering how hungover she’d been after she’d gone out and celebrated last week. And the other mess that’d been made that night, as well. “No.”

“We don’t have to get a drink,” he tries, probably mistaking her smile as her playing hard to get, or something equally stupid.

Sighing, Shaw doesn’t bother answering. She’s finding it nowhere near as fun talking to Tomas when Root isn’t around to get all those worried wrinkles in her forehead about it. She smiles a little to herself again, remembering how confused and pouty Root had looked that time she’d been abandoned at Fusco’s, and—

Oh, goddamn it.

She _is_ trapped in the fucking Faraday cage.

And Tomas keeps thinking she’s smiling at him. “Now that IFTEC’s over, and you’re not the co-Chair anymore, and I’m not a participant…”

“Look,” Shaw says, finally looking up at him and pausing. She’d forgotten just how good his face was, and she feels the slightest tug of temptation, before shaking her head slightly. “I have no doubt it’d be fun, but it’s not going to happen.”

Tomas squints down at her. “Wait, you don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

“God, no,” Shaw makes a face.

“But there is someone? That you care about?” he pushes, trying to find a reason, and Shaw’s trying to remember what that reason is the longer she stares at how long his eyelashes are.

“… Sure,” she eventually says, hoping that’ll make him go away.

Tomas shakes his head forlornly. “Alright,” he says, and he leaves easily, ego still apparently intact, and Shaw heaves yet another sigh.

Lately that’s about all she feels like she’s been doing. She misses when she used to get to roll her eyes all the time.

Grabbing her coat from the nearly empty coat check, Shaw notes that Root’s coat is still there, along with a handful of others.

Shaw checks the time. 9:26 p.m.

She could do with some more dessert. The mini cheesecakes they’d been served with dinner had been _extremely_ mini.

Grabbing Root’s coat too, she sets off to find her, checking the A/V projection room at the back first. She wonders how difficult it’d be to get Root to foot the bill if they hit up the new crepe place down the street.

Poking her head into both sets of bathrooms, Shaw still can’t find any sign of Root, but she does catch an unsuspecting guy at the urinal. Maybe they could break into Fusco’s café with the spare key she knows he actually keeps under the mat… she has a feeling Root wouldn’t have any pesky moral or ethical objections to that.

Retracing her steps, Shaw realizes she didn’t check the meeting room they’d been working in before, and makes her way down the hallway. They could always just go to the grocery store, too. Root probably wouldn’t care if Shaw tossed everything into the cart, and maybe she could even pick up next week’s groceries that way.

Turning the corner, Shaw comes to a grinding halt.

She can’t see Root’s face, but she doesn’t need to.

She can see Lambert’s extraordinarily pleased grin as Root leans in close against him, pressing him against the wall, whispering in his ear, being held in place by his hands hovering near her _ass_.

And she can see the reflection of Martine’s equally disturbing smile, leaning on the wall next to them, watching the two of them having their intimate-looking close-quarters heart-to-heart intently.

She doesn’t know _what_ the fuck is happening right now, so she just whirls around and makes her way back to the coat check.

Dropping Root’s coat on the desk, she checks her watch again and decides to forget all of her previous options and just head to the nearest liquor store.

 

* * *

 

 

Shaw’s propping the door half-open with one hand, and Root doesn’t know if Shaw’s about to let her in, or close the door in her face.

There’s an interesting mix of micro-expressions weaved into Shaw’s scowl – Root isn’t sure if even Shaw knows what they all are – but Root thinks she can pick out surprise as the most dominant undercurrent.

After some time, Shaw finally lets the door swing open, keeping a wide berth between herself and Root as she enters, closing the door and standing in front of it, arms crossed.

“What are you doing here?” Shaw asks.

Root holds up a pen as she crosses Shaw’s apartment with ease to settle on the bed. “You left your pen behind.”

“That’s not mine.”

Root drops the pen back into her bag, unperturbed, and smiles up at Shaw from her very comfortable cross-legged position on Shaw’s bed. “Oh. My mistake.”

She’s in an exceedingly good mood, and she can tell it’s starting to rub off on Shaw, whose posture has slackened somewhat as she steps closer.

“Why are you really here, Root?” Shaw asks, standing awkwardly in front of the bed.

Root hesitates, running her hand through her hair. She could rise up and pull Shaw down onto the bed with her so easily, and from the way Shaw seems to be watching her hands and leaning forward just the slightest, the same thought has occurred to her as well.

But then she remembers the fantastic story she’d come to tell, and lounges back on the bed.

“How well do you know our good friend Harry?” she asks Shaw, and she thinks she sees a slight sag of disappointment, maybe, in Shaw’s shoulders as Shaw rolls her eyes and heads over to her kitchen counter.

“I wouldn’t say I _know_ him,” Shaw mutters, grabbing the open bottle of coconut rum and coming back to sit gingerly at the very foot of the bed, as far from Root as she can manage.

Root tilts her head, looking fondly at Shaw as she takes a swig. “Sameen,” she says patiently.

Shaw rolls her eyes again, but the faint stirrings of a smile are beginning to appear. “Well enough, I guess. I’m really just in it for the dog.”

“Okay,” Root hums. She sits back against Shaw’s headboard, reaching behind with one hand to hoist herself against it, and catches a sharp glint in Shaw’s eye as they both remember the last time she’d grasped at a headboard. Bringing her hand down slowly, she focuses on the sight of teeth dragging slowly against Shaw’s bottom lip.

There’s something different about Shaw tonight, and Root can’t decipher what it could be. It’s not like the stiff, artless way Shaw had been careful to maintain physical distance between them ever since last week, and it’s not like the old, embarrassed hostility that had colored their interactions with each other before last week. There’s something else in there.

“So?” Shaw asks, getting impatient.

“So apparently,” Root says, stretching out and crossing her ankles in front of Shaw, “Greer _really_ wants to know what Harry’s up to. He thought that I might know him as well as you do, so he sent Martine and Jeremy after me.”

Shaw drops her gaze down to the blankets, haphazardly bunched up on the bed, brow fierce and mouth slanted.

Watching her curiously, Root says, “I’ve been spending a lot of time with Martine lately, trying to find out how much they know about what Greer’s up to.”

Shaw’s mouth purses, and she’s started to pick somewhat viciously at the pilling sheets.

Root sits forward and tries to get a better look at Shaw’s face. Something is definitely up, but she can’t seem to get a good enough handle on what it is, and Shaw’s looking up at her with an unreadable stare.

She already knows that Shaw dislikes Martine, but she had no idea their rivalry ran this deep. Whenever Root mentions Martine, Shaw always closes off like this, and Root wonders what else Martine could have possibly done besides snake a scholarship out from under Shaw to get her to this level of resentment.

“Anyway,” Root says after a moment, deciding to skip over the details of how she and Martine started comparing notes on technology that had begun to sound suspiciously like equipment for super-criminals – intelligent earpieces and shock-absorbent data storage, _really_ – and heads right to the ending. “I might be onto some pretty sketchy stuff, and Harry might want to know that his top-secret work could be important to it.”

Shaw pulls her knees up to her chin and still doesn’t say anything, but her hand steals across to Root’s foot and begins tapping on it thoughtfully.

Watching Shaw’s finger tap rhythmically, Root concludes, “I think the schedule for my involvement in Harry’s work just got moved up. And all I had to do was play nice for a little while with Greer’s cronies.”

Shaw’s hand stutters to a stop at Root’s ankle, caught between the bottoms of Root’s black jeans and the edges of her socks. Her eyes don’t leave Root’s.

“What do you mean by play nice?” Shaw asks suspiciously.

Root lets her gaze drop down to Shaw’s lips. It takes her a moment to process Shaw’s question, and she tilts her head, suddenly understanding. She looks back up to Shaw’s eyes, carefully looking for traces of the agitation she thinks she can detect under Shaw’s stock-still features.

Letting a smirk wind its way onto her face slowly, Root doesn’t say anything, watching Shaw’s eyes widen just the slightest as her silence is interpreted to be an answer in and of itself.

There’s a lush, tangible warmth curling into her chest and spreading outwards at the downturn of Shaw’s mouth as they stare at each other, and Root eventually says, “Martine, especially, took quite well to me.”

She’s never seen Shaw’s eyes so dark before.

“You— and Martine?”

Shaw’s breathing is shallow and rapid, chest appearing to contract in on itself, and all after what seems to be a monumental exertion of self-control.

Root nearly beams, done with her game, having already gotten the outcome she hadn’t known she’d been after.

“I wasn’t interested in playing nice like that with _them_ ,” Root says happily. “I already have someone in mind for that… although _nice_ may not be the right word here.”

Somehow Root’s managed to pull herself forward without even noticing, with her knees pulled up and posture imitating Shaw’s, faces inches apart as they sit side by side. Root searches Shaw’s eyes, trying not to laugh outright at the relief quickly masked by an artfully disinterested glare.

“Is that why you came here?” Shaw’s voice sounds slightly strained, but her face is still struggling not to give anything away, and Root can feel her own breathing rate increasing.

“I just wanted to tell someone,” Root says simply.

Shaw nods once, as if to herself, and her hand is skimming up Root’s leg.

“They said you were too loyal,” Root says, voice hitching as Shaw’s hand travels back down to the curve of her hip. “Or else you would’ve been the one Martine and Jeremy were trying to—”

And with that, Shaw’s suddenly pushing up against her, grabbing her by the waist, pulling up against her until they’re both fumbling to intertwine their thighs as they kneel on the bed. Their mouths are moving against each other furiously, and Root doesn’t even feel like she’s had enough time to process what’s happening when Shaw begins ripping at the button on her jeans.

She doesn’t need time to process, she decides, allowing herself to be pushed down on Shaw’s pillow as her pants get pulled off.

Her fingers clench in Shaw’s hair to keep lips and tongue and teeth pressed up against her throat, wondering how many bites and marks Shaw could possibly leave, urging Shaw’s pants off with her feet.

Root tries to pull Shaw’s top off, but Shaw forces her hands down and _growls_ as she continues sucking and nipping at Root’s collarbone, and Root can’t stop herself from moaning. She halfheartedly struggles to lift her arms up, but most of her energy is directed towards sinking into the feeling of Shaw’s tongue licking the faintly welling blood from the mark newly left on her shoulder.

Shaw’s other hand has been preoccupied with her ass this entire time, and not gently. Her hips jerk forward as Shaw’s fingers dig in possessively, nails almost piercing skin, and Root urges Shaw’s fingers around to the front with a whimper, needing to be touched.

Shaw abruptly lets go, and pulls her top off in one quick motion. Tugging Root’s off in jerky motions and brushing the hair from Root’s face afterwards, Shaw looks down at her and just takes hold of her face with both hands.

Root stares up at Shaw, stares at the way Shaw’s eyes are proudly cataloguing every mark and scratch that’s been left, stares at the first smile she’s seen on Shaw’s face since the last time they’d done this.

She reaches up toward Shaw and pulls her down by the back of her neck, refusing to let Shaw drive their kiss this time, insistently moving her lips gently and slowly until Shaw’s lips finally yield and soften against hers. When their tongues meet this time, for the first time, they aren’t fighting against each other, and instead Root pulls Shaw flush down against her as they explore each other.

The feel of her leg sliding in between Shaw’s and the unobstructed contact between her skin and slick heat prompt Root to worry gently at Shaw’s lip. They share a long exhale, made shaky by Root’s squirming as Shaw’s fingers scratch gently again, this time along the length of her body.

Root pushes upward, trying to flip them over, but Shaw keeps her hand on Root’s collarbone as a weight, still matching Root’s leisurely pace as their teeth and lips nip at each other.

When Root pulls free and opens her eyes, she pulls the hand on her collarbone up slowly, pressing open-mouthed kisses on the palm and biting gently, waiting for Shaw to open her eyes as well. Eventually Shaw’s eyes peek open lethargically, and Root slides Shaw’s index finger into her mouth.

She can’t help the brilliant smile on her face upon seeing the concentrated look of arousal on Shaw’s face, eyes closing shut again and teeth clenching.

Flipping them over suddenly, Root’s smile only grows as Shaw’s eyes fly open underneath her.

“Root,” Shaw nearly snarls.

Grinning down at her, Root presses a gentle kiss on the underside of Shaw’s jaw, before moving down along Shaw’s neck and sucking until she’s sure she’s left at least one mark to rival the ones left on her by Shaw.

“Root,” Shaw repeats, but this time it’s an entirely different snarl, as Root’s hips press down into her.

Taking her sweet time as she makes her way down along Shaw’s body, she visits all the places Shaw had hissed and groaned at last time, paying special attention to the spots where she can hear Shaw biting back moans.

Shaw’s feet dig into the mattress as Root kisses along the underside of her arms, fingers scraping the insides of her thighs.

“Root, I swear to god,” Shaw bites out. “Just _do_ it.”

Root rests her forearms on Shaw’s chest, enjoying the shallowness of Shaw’s breath as she smiles down calmly. “What’s the magic word?”

“Fuck you,” Shaw bares her teeth in a smile.

“That’s a very nice try, Sameen,” Root says pleasantly, but with a miniscule shift so that more of her weight bears down on Shaw’s chest.

They stay like that for some time, with Root lying atop Shaw, one hand busy drawing lazy circles on Shaw’s thighs, with the other idly tweaking Shaw’s nipple, as Shaw stares stubbornly up at Root with murder in her eyes.

Root’s middle finger accidentally dips along Shaw’s folds and bends in, just for a second, and a strangled sound escapes Shaw.

“Oops,” Root says mildly, withdrawing her finger and returning to Shaw’s thigh, now leaving traces of wetness with each circle.

Shaw’s hands scrabble around, trying to find Root’s hand to guide it to where she needs it to go, but Root brings her hand up and slowly slips the same finger into her mouth instead, enjoying Shaw’s dilation of pupils and sharp intake of breath.

“Please,” Shaw finally growls, bucking her hips insistently, both hands latched onto the arm holding her down.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Root smiles, stretching to give Shaw a quick peck.

“Turn around,” Shaw orders, making a face and avoiding Root’s smug mouth, turning to stack her pillows under her head instead.

Root laughs, then acquiesces.

She runs her hand down Shaw’s stomach till her palm rests on the mound, then presses suddenly against Shaw’s clit once she feels Shaw’s mouth on her. Rocking gently, she tries desperately not to lose herself in the feeling of Shaw’s tongue probing into her, and presses her mouth against the junction of Shaw’s inner thigh.

Shaw makes a frustrated sound, but doesn’t let up and begins to alternate between using her tongue and her fingers. Root bites Shaw’s thigh in response, before finally using her hands to spread Shaw apart and lick.  

Root just knows Shaw’s keeping track of how many times each of them has moaned, but as two of her fingers easily slide in and are joined by a third, Root thinks she might have the upper edge as long as Shaw hadn’t started counting from the very beginning.

And then Shaw does something with her _tongue_ while her fingers keep thrusting in and out, the same thing she’d done before, right before that excruciatingly sustained orgasm that she hadn’t let Root escape from. Root sits up and arches back, keeping one hand at Shaw’s clit while the other continues moving in and out of Shaw, but light panting and audible gasps are being cast right out of her mouth and she can almost _feel_ the smirk on Shaw’s face.

When she feels herself clenching around Shaw’s fingers, Root brings her mouth back down and pulls with her lips before letting go with a loud smack, pleased to feel Shaw also clenching around her fingers in response. They both stubbornly draw their orgasms out, no longer trying to restrain their cries, until finally Shaw launches Root off of her and curls up reflexively.

Root tumbles to her side and throws her head back, spent. She closes her eyes and tries to ingrain every single sensation, every single sound, and every single hair standing on end at this moment, into her memory.

She feels Shaw crawl over, bringing back the pillows, and lets Shaw slide one under her head. Root keeps her eyes shut, because she doesn’t want to open them to start looking for her clothes yet. She lets Shaw kiss her, warmly, with one hand on her cheek and the other on her lower back.

The kiss ends, and Root opens her eyes reluctantly, to see Shaw looking at the marks left on Root’s neck again, this time with a hint of consternation mixed in with the satisfaction. Shaw lightly drags her finger across the heaviest of them, and Root stifles the resultant twinges of pain.

Shaw tucks her head on a bent arm and tugs a blanket over them both.

Root lifts her head, surprised, but Shaw’s eyes are already closing and one leg is already carelessly tossed on top of Root’s.

“Go to sleep,” Shaw mumbles.

Perplexed, Root settles back down and curls herself into Shaw. She opens her mouth, not sure what she’s about to say, but Shaw interrupts her before she gets the chance.

“I mean it,” Shaw grumbles, as if she knows Root was about to say something even though her eyes are closed. Shaw’s hand wanders down and rests soothingly on Root’s ass, softly covering the marks she’d left before.

Root closes her mouth after a moment and silently nudges her nose against Shaw’s before finally closing her eyes.

“Night,” Shaw says sleepily.

 

* * *

 

 

“God,” Root gasps. “Sameen, stop.”

Shaw smirks up at her from between her legs. The sunlight peeks in and a slash of light cuts across, bringing half of Shaw’s body to shine bright and gold as she climbs back up next to Root. “Seniors _do_ get tired out easily.”

Root tugs Shaw in, wrapping arms and legs around her and blowing a feeble raspberry on the closest shoulder. Root laughs when Shaw grumbles and tries to squirm away.

They lie like that for a while, drifting back in and out of sleep, until Shaw’s phone goes off next to Root’s ear, nearly deafening her. Root reaches over and hands it to Shaw, who irritably punches at the screen to shut it up.

“It’s noon,” Root murmurs.

“Mmh,” Shaw replies, burying her head back under the blanket. “It’s Saturday.”

Root wonders if she should try to leave again. The last time she did, Shaw had managed to persuade her to stay in bed a little longer, but Root can’t help feeling like there’s still a timer ticking down somewhere.

“Are you hungry?” she finally asks.

Shaw’s head pops out of the blanket as she considers it.

Root takes her in, hair mussed, half swathed in bedsheets and emanating an air of having been thoroughly kissed. There’s a tightness in Root’s chest, and she breathes in unsteadily, not even trying to stop the huge smile from spreading across her face.

“I could eat.” Shaw’s face immediately falls as she remembers, “But I’m out of groceries.”

“We could go out,” Root says, floating the idea of brunch, then sees the look on Shaw’s face and realizes belatedly how loaded of a phrase it was.

“For breakfast,” she adds, but it’s too late.

Shaw opens her mouth but doesn’t respond, eyes lowered. Her leg tightens and brings Root closer, but she still struggles to find something to say.

Root waits, but after a prolonged silence, it becomes clear to her that Shaw is intensely uncomfortable with any suggestion of a relationship, and that’s something that Root had managed to forget sometime between filching Lambert's pen and knocking on Shaw’s door last night.

Thinking ruefully that this had all come with a truth table from the outset, she’d just ignored it and tried to superimpose her own arguments in, Root slides out from under the covers and starts looking around for her clothes.

“Actually,” Root says, grateful that she’s still able to sound casual and nonchalant, if tired and satisfied, “I forgot I have a lunch meeting, and I should go home to get changed.”

She looks back at Shaw, still half-buried in blankets, but now fully awake and watching her with that dark, unreadable look on her face. Shaw almost looks like she might have something to say, but the seconds tick by without a word.

The timer’s done counting down, Root realizes, and she smiles fondly down at Shaw. There’s a lot that she wants to commit to memory, but right now, she thinks she’ll miss the awkward silences and total lack of social grace the most.

“I have to lock the door behind you,” Shaw says eventually, still studying her without giving anything away. Shaw gathers her blankets and follows Root to the door.

“Well,” Root smiles, turning around, intent on seeing Shaw’s face screw up in disgust one last time, “I’m glad I came.”

There’s a small, exasperated smirk on Shaw’s face instead as she opens the door, and she pulls Root down by her shoulders to kiss her determinedly.

Root closes her eyes and leans in.

The first time Root tries to end the kiss, Shaw wraps her hand behind Root’s neck and pulls her down farther, and Root realizes that Shaw was probably straining to reach her before, so she bends down a bit more to lessen the distance.

The second time Root tries to end the kiss, Shaw’s other hand comes up and her sheet starts slipping down, and Root realizes that soon Shaw might be standing naked in her doorway, so she steps closer to hold the sheet up between their bodies.

“Bye, Root,” Shaw says, breathless and flushed, by the time they finally break apart.

“Bye, Sam,” Root replies, equally affected, as the door closes behind her.

Root looks down at her phone and idly wonders if she should change Shaw’s contact information to “Mixed Signal Generator.” And, she muses, as an added bonus, she probably wouldn’t be able to remember that if she ever felt tempted to drunk dial. 


	12. +3 weeks later

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! sorry about the delay! massive writer's block and real-life demands, yk how it is. anyway, thank you all for reading! for leaving kudos, commenting, even rec-ing it out to other people (!?!? which i saw a couple of times by accident on tumblr and, like, holy crap. thank you!) 
> 
> hopefully this last chapter wrapped up this part of their university lives adequately (it's ok i know it didn't) aaaand... yes. tada! writing this fic was definitely made more fun when i realized that, like, other people were actually reading it........ anyway. thanks again, folks ( ◜◒◝ )♡

“Root!” Shaw ignores the startled student whose ear she’d just yelled into, and hurries toward the elevator.

“Oh,” Root says. “Hi, Sameen.”

“Hey,” Shaw says, peering up at Root. This is the first time she’s seen her since Root had basically flown out after their computations in genetic engineering midterm.

They haven’t spoken since then, either. Not since that brief, stilted conversation while waiting outside prior to the test, during which Shaw had straight-out told Root she was getting creeped out by Root’s very uncharacteristic reticence, only to be supplied with a non-answer and silent evasion in response.

“… Hey,” Shaw says again, when Root just nods and smiles at her, then turns back to face the elevator.

Shaw doesn’t know what else to say. What do people say when they’re trying to make small talk?

“How are you?” Root asks politely, still looking up at the elevator indicator.

Small talk is stupid.

“Fine,” Shaw says. “Are you coming to the social tonight?”

Root hums noncommittally. “I don’t know. Who else is going?”

“Everyone,” Shaw lies.

Root thinks about that for a second. Shaw doesn’t understand the look on her face right now, but eventually it looks like Root comes to some sort of a decision and nods. “Alright then. Are we meeting at Fusco’s café first and then heading out?”

“Sure,” Shaw says. “Uh, yeah.”

The silence is almost painful as they continue waiting for the elevator.

“Where you headed?” Shaw finally asks, more to break the silence than anything.

“Fusco’s café, I guess,” Root says.

Shaw nods. “Me too. Wanna go together?”

Root adjusts her bag slightly and finally turns to face Shaw, but the slight tug Shaw feels in the pit of her stomach when she meets Root’s gaze head-on is tempered at the sight of Root’s slightly apologetic smile. “Actually, I think I need to go home first to drop off my stuff. I can just meet you all there.”

The suggestion _I could just come with you_ is balanced on the tip of Shaw’s tongue, but she swallows it. She wracks her brain, trying to think of something else to say in response.

She’s usually always been one to prefer silence than trying to fill it with insincere, pointless words, but something is _strange_. Trying to make a quick getaway? That’s her thing, not Root’s.

“Hello,” comes her least favourite voice in the entire world.

“Oh,” Root says. “Hi, Martine.”

Shaw’s eyes narrow in disgust. She’d never noticed it before, but their names rhyme. She doesn’t know why something as silly as that is bothering her as deeply as it is, but she resolutely stares straight ahead at the _slowest elevator in the world_ and refuses to acknowledge Martine’s presence.

“How’ve you been?”

Shaw tunes out their idle small talk. Briefly, she considers paying attention to try to see the kinds of banal things people force themselves to say to each other, but the idea of learning how to act more like Martine repulses her.

“Did you see the article I posted on your wall about the Nyquist theorem and high-res audio encoding?”

“Oh,” Root says, with about as much enthusiasm as she had for her conversation with Shaw a minute ago. “No, not yet, but I’ll be sure to check it out.”

“I just remembered that conversation we had about cochlear implants,” Martine smiles, playfully nudging Root’s shoulder with her own. Shaw finds herself taking a step toward them with vaguely menacing intent, but quickly turns back to face the elevators before they notice.

Out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she can see Root looking at her out of the corner of _her_ eye, and Shaw has just about had it with all of this confusion and bewilderment and utterly useless _need_ to know what Root is thinking.

It gives her no small amount of satisfaction to see that Root’s treating Martine with about as much diffidence as she had with Shaw. Maybe Root’s coming down with a cold. Knowing her, Shaw would bet anything that Root hadn’t even bothered to try to make herself any soup.

The elevator dings and announces its imminent arrival, and Shaw mulls over the way Root seems to be holding her away at the same amount of arm’s length as Martine, if not more. A horrifying thought pops into her mind as to _why_ , and suddenly the thought of the three of them sharing an elevator together makes Shaw feel claustrophobia clawing up at her before they even step inside.

Much in the same way Shaw had found herself trying to take a step toward them to break up the casual contact of their shoulders without even thinking about it, the hand holding her coffee finds itself left behind in Martine’s path as Shaw moves to enter the elevator.

“Ah!”

“Oops,” Shaw says, after a moment. She barely manages to hide a smile aimed at her emptied cup, as if the thing had moved itself.

Martine doesn’t say anything, but the terrifying look in her eye spurs Shaw to say, “I have a Tide to Go stick with me, why don’t we go to the bathroom and get you dried off?”

Root’s already in the elevator, holding the doors open with a startled expression. There’s a hint of worry in there too, as she sizes up Martine’s icy rage and Shaw’s less-than-remorseful glee.

“You go on ahead,” Shaw says, punching the doors close button and waving Root’s hand away before jumping out of the elevator.

“Uh—” she hears Root say in protest, clearly troubled as to what might happen between the two of them without her there.

They watch the doors close on Root, before Martine turns to face Shaw with a measured exhale. “Well? Where’s the Tide stick?”

“What?” Shaw asks. “Oh, no, I don’t have one.”

She makes her way over to take the stairs down without a backward glance, unconcerned by turning her back to Martine. The washroom is in the opposite direction, anyway, and Martine should probably be trying to get all that coffee off her nice grey shirt as soon as possible.

By the time she gets to the bottom of the stairs, Root’s nowhere to be found. Shaw tamps down what she’s starting to maybe identify as _disappointment_ , a frustratingly recurring thing not _quite_ related to the anger she’s all too familiar with, and sets off for Fusco’s café instead.

Without really thinking about it, Shaw’s got Root’s profile pulled up on her mobile app, and she starts scrolling to look for that article that Martine had mentioned earlier.

She has to scroll quite a bit to find it, which is surprising given Root doesn’t seem to have many actual friends displayed on her profile. There is, however, a fairly prominent post on her profile announcing that she and Claire Mahoney became friends two weeks ago, and a whole slew of posts since then.

> _Claire Mahoney ► Root  
>  _ _22 hrs_
> 
> i read this article and thought of you :)))))  
>  [**“FREAK” flaw in Android and Apple devices cripples HTTPS crypto protection**](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/freak-flaw-in-android-and-apple-devices-cripples-https-crypto-protection/)
> 
> _Root, Jeremy Lambert and 2 others like this._

Shaw scrolls back up a little more.

> _Root shared a link.  
>  5 hrs_
> 
> **[What the Future of Government Surveillance Looks Like](http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/03/what-future-government-surveillance-looks/106425/)  
>  **
> 
> _Denton Weeks, Martine Rousseau and 5 others like this._

Shaw frowns and pulls up her message history on her phone.

So Root hadn’t bothered to reply to Shaw’s casual reminders about the social today or earlier this week, but had liked and posted things and presumably talked to other people since then.

Shaw can feel her mouth forming a severe slash as she scrolls up their message history and notes the abrupt switch from Root bombarding her with messages on the hour, every hour up until the awards ceremony three weeks ago, to _Shaw_ being the one initiating conversation about post-competition related concerns until the conversations inevitably died out with a “Kk” or “I emailed it to you” from Root.

Over the past few weeks of feeling infuriatingly off-balance once she’d realized Root was basically giving her the cold shoulder, Shaw had mused about just tracking Root down and hashing out whatever _this_ was, thoroughly this time, face-to-face. Or face-to-fist. _Those_ were the kinds of conversations she was good at starting and ending.

But no sooner had Shaw entered Fusco’s café last week and said, “Where’s Root? Have you seen Root?” than the thought had occurred to her that there was no telling what she might find if she just casually dropped by Root’s place unannounced.

The idea that she might go looking for Root only to discover her entertaining any number of her dubious _fans_ , the same idea that’s currently reoccurring to her now as she steps inside Fusco’s café…

Shaw pats her stomach worriedly. Maybe she’s hungry. That might account for the faintly ill, churning feeling happening inside of her right now.

Shaw knows hunger, though. That’s a feeling she’s intimately comfortable with, and it’s clear that whatever is roiling around within her right now can’t be hunger, because it settles abruptly once Shaw sees Root sitting alone at a table by the window.

“Hey,” she says, sitting down across from her.

Root gives her a perfunctory smile. “I’m guessing nobody else can make it tonight?”

Shaw shrugs, opting not to mention that nobody else was made aware of tonight’s “social.” “Guess so.”

“So you ladies gonna buy anything or am I keeping this place open for you for free?” Fusco calls out from the back.

Root opens her mouth to reply, but Shaw beats her to it. “Root’s already basically bought this entire place, Lionel. Simmer down.”

They hear muffled banging of various kitchen paraphernalia from the back, but that’s about it as far as a reply from Fusco goes.

“So,” Root says, looking down at the table. “Did you get the cash prizes all sorted out with Zoe for the winners?”

“I thought you were doing that,” Shaw objects.

“Oh,” Root says, frowning a little. She pulls out her phone. “Alright, I’ll just message her now.”

“I’m seeing her soon, don’t worry about it,” Shaw says quickly. The last thing she needs right now is for Root to ask any of the others why they hadn’t shown up tonight, but she thinks she can detect some of the usual smugness peeking out from Root’s studied expression of indifference already anyway.

“That’s everything, then,” Root says, finally meeting Shaw’s eyes as she rests her elbow on the table and her chin in her palm. She looks almost curious, and Shaw shifts in her chair uncomfortably, feeling like Root’s looking for the answer to a question that Shaw was never even asked.

“I guess so,” Shaw says in response. The weight of IFTEC being completely over now, along with any reason for Root to bother her (or vice versa, as has been the apparent trend the past few weeks) settles over her, and she desperately wracks her brain to think of something else to say.

“What’ve you been up to?” Shaw finally asks. It almost bursts out of her in frustration, and she breaks eye contact with Root and picks at the specials menu on the table. From the edges of her vision, she can see Root leaning back and settling into her chair.

“A few different things,” Root says evasively.

Shaw nods, feeling as though she’s pulling teeth. “With Finch and his artificial super intelligence stuff?”

At that, Root’s entire demeanour brightens for a second, but she remains as evasive as ever with the details of what exactly it is that’s causing that brilliant, gleaming smile to slip out. “Well… yes.”

“So tell me about it.”

“I can’t.”

“Really?” Shaw leans forward, aware of how low-cut her tank top is today. Which was _definitely_ not something she had carefully considered this morning when getting dressed. Nor was it _extremely_ satisfying for her to see Root’s gaze being pulled down, almost magnetically.

Root wets her lips unconsciously, and her gaze is undeniably _not_ meeting Shaw’s eyes, but her voice comes out steady. “Absolutely not.”

Shaw leans forward a little more, but that seems to have pushed it a bit far. Root blinks and almost smirks up at her, looking vaguely as though she’s proud of herself.

“Fine,” Shaw grumbles, sitting back in her chair. “I’ll just get it out of Reese one day.”

“Good luck with _that_.” Root’s tone is amused. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Finch’s guard dog isn’t exactly talkative.”

“Talking isn’t exactly the technique I had in mind to get it out of him,” Shaw says archly.

The corners of Root’s mouth quirk upwards in a familiar way, and Shaw feels a sudden rushing sense of – something – similar to the feeling she gets when she takes the first bite of a meal ordered from an extremely sketchy new place and discovers that it isn’t actually terrible.

“So you’ll be sticking around for a while then?” Shaw asks, very casually.

“For now, I suppose…”

Despite herself, Shaw’s head feels almost light at the prospect of Root hanging around IFT for another entire year. She opens her mouth, trying to decide whether she wants to use the word “bug” or “pester” to describe her expectations of Root during her final year, but Root finishes her thought before Shaw gets a chance to say anything.

“… But hopefully I won’t be here for too long. I think I want to see the world, you know?” The smile on Root’s face is gone, having disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared, and Root gazes distractedly out the window.

Shaw doesn’t know what to say in response, so she stares down at the menu she’s been picking at over the duration of this conversation. The edges of the lamination are coming off.

“Right,” she says, after a beat.

Root looks lost in thought, and Shaw finds herself trying to decipher what it is that Root might be thinking.

“Hey, Lucy and Ethel,” Fusco says, interrupting the silence that had fallen over them. He’s all packed up and ready to go home, jabbing a thumb behind him at the door. “Time to get going.”

They gather their things and walk outside, hovering awkwardly in front of the café.

“So, uh, I actually had a question about Casey’s assignment this week? The one on the hidden Markov models?”

Root eyes her carefully, but doesn’t say anything.

“Did you… do the assignment yet?”

“Not yet,” Root says slowly, still scrutinizing Shaw with a determined expression on her face, as if Shaw is a particularly difficult to locate sample on a microscope slide.

Shaw chews on the inside of her cheek. The next question is obvious, hanging in the air between them, but she can’t bring herself to ask. Not when Root’s got that maddeningly thoughtful look in her eye, _studying_ her, appearing to be thinking a thousand different things at once and not letting Shaw be privy to any of it.

So Shaw spins on her heel instead and says, “Right. Okay. See you around, Root.”

Shaw is in the process of rolling her eyes – at all this stupid weirdness, mostly, but also that she even _tried_ – as she stomps away, and a few minutes have passed before she hears steps running up behind her to catch up.

“Want to work on it together?” Root asks from behind.

Shaw _will not_ let herself look surprised.

“Fine,” she says indifferently. “Your place?”

Shaw chances a quick look over when Root hums in agreement, surprised to see a small smile on her face.

Either Shaw has no idea what smiles even are anymore, or she just has no idea what Root is ever doing.

 

* * *

 

 

Shaw’s been inching steadily closer to her on the couch for the past few hours, and Root finds herself almost marveling at how creeping and gradual the approach has been. They’d started off with a healthy foot and a half separating them, with Root making sure she sat off to one side, but now there’s barely five inches separating their thighs.

And now slightly less than that, as Shaw sets her laptop on the table in front of them and turns back towards Root.

“Do we have to do a blastn search here?” Shaw asks, voice intimate and low, leaning over to indicate a search field on Root’s laptop. The space between them further narrows until they’re just on the verge of touching.

Root’s hyperaware of the energy she can feel emanating off of Shaw, and she’s careful not to turn her head when she replies, voice slightly breathless. “I think the DNA sequences are too long for that to be effective. MEGABLAST, probably.”

“Right,” Shaw says, not moving, still just a hair’s breadth away.

Root turns her head, just the slightest, and bites her lip nervously when Shaw turns to face her head-on. She can feel Shaw’s breath, hot and gentle, washing over her, and she can’t stop her gaze from flickering between the eyes and the lips that are now far too close for their intent to be mistaken.

A hand settles on her thigh, just above where her laptop is resting, and altogether too high to be proprietary.

Shaw’s lips part, and Root can feel herself holding her breath, stubbornly refusing to let her eyes fall shut.

“Wanna hear a joke?” Shaw asks.

Root blinks. That had not been what she’d been expecting to come from Shaw’s mouth at all.

The look on Shaw’s face is vaguely embarrassed, but also a little… pleased with herself? “If I was an enzyme—”

Root can’t help the extraordinarily startled chuckle that escapes her, and Shaw instinctively leans away and sits back on her side of the couch with a resentful look on her face.

“No, no, go on,” Root says, amused, all previous inclinations of avoiding close or intimate contact with Shaw forgotten. This is the oldest joke in the textbook, and she wants to hear Shaw muddle her way through this.

Root places her laptop on the table, too, and moves over, taking Shaw’s hand and placing it back on her upper thigh. “I’ve _never_ heard this one before.”

Shaw tries to yank her hand away, but Root’s hand is firm, pressing it into her leg.

“You ruined it,” Shaw mumbles grouchily.

“I’m sure I didn’t,” Root smiles, leaning into Shaw happily. “I’m sure your joke is going to be wonderful.”

With a small huff, Shaw leans into Root as well, then looks down at their hands on Root’s leg.

Root waits patiently.

Finally, after some time, Shaw turns their hands over and interlinks their fingers, almost tentatively. “If I was an enzyme, I’d be DNA helicase…”

“Oh? Why’s that?” Root asks politely, noting Shaw’s other hand coming across and hovering around her hip area.

Shaw ducks her head down and mutters something inaudible, mouth moving but no words coherently coming out.

“Sorry, what was that?” Root murmurs, ducking her head down to follow Shaw’s.

“… So I could unzip your genes,” Shaw eventually says, as deadpan as Root has ever heard her, resolutely refusing to meet Root’s eyes, but her other hand is sliding its way down Root’s stomach to the button of her pants.

When Root fails to give even a courtesy laugh, Shaw peeks up at Root, clearly confused by the faint lines on Root’s forehead and the frown playing across her lips.

Root lets go of the hand on her thigh and stills the one playing with the front waistline of her jeans, mind racing as she evaluates the heat flooding through her.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening already, not right now – she was supposed to have more _time_ – but it’s clearly happening right now.

And this was supposed to happen on her terms – _she_ was supposed to be the one to decide when this would end – but it clearly won’t be on her terms as much as she would have liked.

So she may as well make the most of it, Root reasons, whether she’s ready for it or not, and she drags her hand up Shaw’s arm slowly, trying to come to terms with everything within the next few seconds.

“Want to hear a poem?” Root asks quietly, stalling, feeling almost defeated, sure that they’re so close now that Shaw will be able to _feel_ her words even if she can’t hear them.

“No,” Shaw says automatically, but then her tone softens just the slightest. “But you’re going to end up telling me anyway.”

“Roses are red,” Root says, with a little huff of wry, sad laughter, cupping Shaw’s face in both hands and staring into her eyes. She pauses, and lets the quiet resonate through the air, studying the way the lights play across the planes of Shaw’s face.

“Violets are blue,” Shaw prompts, after some time has passed, because Root is lingering on every part of the buildup to the beginning of the last time that this is going to happen, even with Shaw’s hands impatiently and repetitively buttoning and unbuttoning her pants.

“If you were a null hypothesis…” Root’s mouth lowers to meet Shaw’s, only _just_ barely touching, and her hands keep hold of Shaw’s face to prevent the closing of the kiss until she’s sure she’s as ready as she can be for this moment.

“… I wouldn’t reject you,” she finally breathes, and then Shaw disregards the feeble amount of resistance Root is putting up and presses forward, taking Root’s lips in with a sigh that’s mirrored as Root pushes back against Shaw’s mouth with her own, overwhelmed.

“I’ve heard that one before,” Shaw mutters, as she unzips Root’s jeans and slides her hands down the back.

Root doesn’t respond, doesn’t think she can, so she just covers the length of Shaw’s body with her own and lays them both horizontal on the couch with Shaw’s knees crooked upwards and outwards. Root settles between her legs, guided by Shaw’s hands, feeling Shaw wrap around her as if they don’t want to let go.

She can’t manage to close her eyes, instead trying to memorize every square inch of Shaw’s face up close like this, bothered by the way Shaw’s eyes are so firmly shut, and so Root breaks their kiss and rotates her pelvis into Shaw, feeling gratified when Shaw’s eyes flutter open to meet hers.

There’s too much light in her living room, and Root’s suddenly consumed by the worry that Shaw might be able to read her face, or see how deeply immersed she is in each and every millisecond. It’s not something Shaw needs to know, because it won’t make a difference in the end anyway, so Root abruptly gets up and pulls Shaw up and off the couch, too.

“Wh—”

“Not here,” Root says, careful to keep her hair down, placing a barrier between herself and Shaw’s inquisitive gaze. She links their hands together and pulls them through to her bedroom, switching off the lights as she passes.

“Get on the bed,” Root’s voice is hoarse now, as she lets go of Shaw’s hand and turns to shut the door firmly. She rests her palms on the door for a second, carefully composing herself as best as she can, grateful that the moonlight streaming in through her windows is cool and feathery.

Root can’t make Shaw’s face out very clearly, just sees the silhouette of Shaw methodically discarding her clothes, and she’s grateful because now there’s no chance that Shaw would – if she even could – be able to decipher Root’s own expression, either.

She stays clothed, brushing Shaw’s hands away when they tug at her, enfolding Shaw underneath her with slow, deliberate motions.

Her eyes are starting to adjust to the darkness, and she thinks she can see the beginnings of what might be concern on Shaw’s face as they stare at each other, with Shaw’s hair fanned out underneath her and Root’s hair framing her face ineffectively instead of hiding it.

So Root lowers herself down and covers Shaw’s mouth with her own, languidly, with her body held up and away. The hand not holding herself up is running down, across, all around every part of Shaw that she can reach.

When Shaw’s hands manage to tug Root’s pants down, having been unzipped earlier, Root kicks them off impatiently and then straddles Shaw so that she has both hands free. One free hand is still exploring and committing Shaw’s body to memory, and the other is now batting away greedy hands as they attempt to roam Root’s body.

“Look at me,” Root murmurs against Shaw’s lips, dragging her mouth down the length of Shaw’s body, nipping gently whenever Shaw breaks eye contact. She doesn’t bite hard enough to leave any bruises reminiscent of the ones she’d had to cover for an entire week after the last time they’d been together, but they’re enough to get Shaw to moan and lock her gaze back into Root’s each time.

She slips one finger in, watching Shaw’s face carefully, then two, observing the swell of Shaw’s chest. Three, and Shaw’s eyes widen before she murmurs Root’s name, and then slowly, four, as Root brings her tongue to flick lazily against Shaw’s clit in conjunction with her thumb.

Shaw’s gripping her hair tightly now, partially to keep her hair out of the way and eyes visible, and partially because Root can feel the tension building in every single one of Shaw’s muscles.

Shaw’s grinding herself into Root’s mouth and trying to draw Root’s fingers further inside her, insistently trying to increase the pace. Stubbornly, Root brings her other hand to clamp down on Shaw’s lower abdomen, holding her in place and adding to the pressure as Root’s fingers curl upwards inside.

“Goddammit, Root,” Shaw hisses, arching her back.

Root’s going too slow; she can see it in the fierce glare being leveled at her as Shaw writhes with each measured flick of the tongue or thumb, and she can hear it in the ragged and uneven breaths with every gentle massage by Root’s buried fingers.

More profanity is unleashed at her the longer Root draws it out, the higher she builds the sensations, and Root drinks it all in. She drinks in the sight of Shaw’s eyes, clouded but still trained on her; she drinks in the feel of Shaw’s legs around her, locked and insistent; she drinks in the _taste_ of Shaw, salty and sweet and musky all at once.

She doesn’t want any of this to end, and draws it out for as long as she can, but when Shaw lets go of her hair and starts scrabbling around for blankets to really be able to grab, Root knows it’s about to be over.

She gradually begins picking up the tempo, following the rhythm being dictated by Shaw’s rolling hips, and sucks _hard_ on Shaw’s clit until Shaw’s screams of fury and climax and frustration have all mingled together wordlessly.

Withdrawing slowly, Root places a gentle kiss on Shaw’s excruciatingly oversensitive lips, before crawling up and kissing Shaw on the mouth deeply and determinedly. If nothing else, she needs Shaw to at least remember the taste of herself mingled into Root’s.

When they break for air, Root rolls onto her back next to Shaw and stares up at her ceiling.

Shaw’s hand creeps over to hold hers, and Root lets her, but she almost can’t even feel the idle patterns being drawn by Shaw’s thumb.

She can feel Shaw _looking_ at her, so she closes her eyes when Shaw leans over to kiss her again.

Root keeps her eyes shut determinedly as Shaw pushes her shirt and bra up, and keeps her lower lip caught between her teeth as Shaw winds her way down.

“Root,” Shaw says, in between gentle kisses. It’s nothing at all like the last few times, when Shaw’s voice had been hard and demanding, and her kisses rough and biting; instead, there’s uncertainty in Shaw’s voice, and almost some _softness_ in her kisses.

Root brushes at Shaw’s hair, keeping her hand gently resting on Shaw’s head, but her eyes still remain screwed shut.

“Root,” Shaw repeats, placing another gentle kiss on Root’s inner thigh. “What do you want me to do?”

Root can hear the frown in Shaw’s voice, can almost feel it on Shaw’s mouth, and she wordlessly opens herself up in response.

Shaw’s hands stop, one on each thigh, and her breath is blowing hot and cold at the same time in between.

“What’s wrong?” Shaw finally asks. “Is this not…?”

“No. Don’t stop,” Root murmurs, eyes still closed, trying not to picture what Shaw’s face looks like in between her legs right now, because she’d been right.

She wasn’t ready for this, and she’d thought she could make the most of it, but she just can’t bring herself yet to accept that the sight she’ll see when she opens her eyes will be the last one of its kind.

Shaw climbs up next to her, carefully keeping a distance between them.

“Look at me,” Shaw orders, but her voice has a slight waver in it and Root hates that all her other senses have been amplified just because her eyes are closed.

Shaw’s fingers wrap around her chin and tug her face to the side.

“Look at me,” Shaw repeats, quieter this time. “Root.”

Root finally opens her eyes and stares back at Shaw. It’s dark, but she knows that Shaw can see that her eyes are probably shining in a way totally unlike the way they’d been shining after the very first time they’d had sex.

There’s no surprise in Shaw’s eyes, but there’s also no comprehension in them, either.

Root sits up and reaches for her housecoat. This is her apartment, she can’t leave, but she can try to go and find someplace else where she can _breathe_.

Shaw’s hand on her wrist – gentle, reassuring, firm – stops her as she gets up.

 “Just sit for a second,” Shaw says quietly. Her voice sounds odd, and Root perches on the edge of the bed, wanting to look over but afraid of what might happen if she does.

They sit in silence for a very long time, until finally Shaw lets out a long, long exhale, frustrated and relieved and glad all at once, as though she’s just managed to puzzle out the missing piece in a homework problem that’s been stumping her.

She scoots over to sit next to Root. There’s an indignant frown on her face that Root can see blaring at her from the outskirts of her vision, and Shaw’s brows are furrowed and _angry_.

“Do you not want to be having feelings for me?” Shaw demands.

Root’s head swivels of its own accord, startled.

“Because that’s _my_ line,” Shaw continues, still angry-looking.

Confused, and completely unprepared, and absolutely not understanding where Shaw is going with this, Root splutters for a brief second before she can reply.

She’d had a dream – about two or three days after she’d left Shaw’s apartment – about one possible permutation of this very exact moment. It’d been silly, and unrealistic, and when Root had finally found herself awake and _crushed_ to find herself jolted back into reality, she’d resolved not to draw out their interactions for longer than was necessary.

None of this was supposed to mean as much to her as it does, and Root immensely regrets how obvious and transparent she’d been this entire time when everyone already knew that it just doesn’t mean the same thing to Shaw as it does to her.

“This… wasn’t supposed to happen,” she eventually says, with a resigned shrug.

“Still my line,” Shaw grinds out between clenched teeth. “You think I _liked_ running around looking for ways to try and talk to you?”

Root’s mouth opens, but she doesn’t have any words. She doesn’t know what’s happening right now.

“You think I _liked_ imagining ways I could pull out every single hair on the head of every single dumbass you flirted with?”

Root’s mouth sags open a little further. She still has no idea what Shaw’s trying to get at, but the answer to this one seems to be a likely yes.

Shaw rolls her eyes at the look on confusion on Root’s face. “For a former criminal mastermind, you’re a real dumbass.”

Pushing her down onto her back, Shaw straddles Root and tugs her housecoat open, before leaning down and kissing Root firmly. Her tongue flicks out and teases Root’s bottom lip, and Root thinks she can feel a slight smile on Shaw’s face.

Root’s mind is racing, and she thinks Shaw can practically hear the gears turning in her head.

“Occam’s razor, you idiot,” Shaw may have grumbled into her neck as she nips and sucks on it. Root isn’t too sure.

Shaw sits up on Root’s hips, pushing Root’s legs up and apart, expression exasperated and almost disbelieving at how long it’s taking to connect the dots. Purposefully grinding herself down and almost hissing at the aligned contact and Root’s sharp gasp, Shaw splays her hands on Root’s chest to keep herself upright.

“Let me put it this way,” Shaw says. “I still haven’t forgiven you for the donut stunt, so tomorrow night you will be making me a carefully plated dinner. None of that mash crap you gave me for breakfast that one time.”

Root’s mouth forms an ‘o’ as Shaw’s roundabout, indirect meaning becomes clear.

“There we go,” Shaw mutters. “I should tell Finch the newest member of his team is a moron.”

Root’s face almost feels like it’s splitting itself with her grin.

The look on Shaw’s face very clearly says, “Not. One. More. Word,” and so Root settles her hands on Shaw’s hips to guide the friction between them, wiping that surly look away and replacing it with one where Shaw’s eyes very nearly roll back.

“So what you’re saying is that you’re staying the night,” Root breathes, now that the forbidding look on Shaw’s face is gone as she arches her back and uses Root as a support.

“No. Whatever. Fine. It’s late and cabs are expensive,” Shaw grumbles, but her hips have started moving again and her voice is breathless.

“And the whole day,” Root suggests, trying – and failing – to stifle a moan in the middle of talking.

Shaw doesn’t even try to sound annoyed. Her breathing is now audibly ragged and her words are coming out choppy. “But then I’d have to put up with you for another entire day.”

“I’m just being pragmatic,” Root says, trying to grin cheekily but instead only managing to punctuate her sentence with a loud moan that causes Shaw’s fingers to curl and scratch at her collarbone.

“Shut up,” Shaw gasps, now bucking her hips frantically at the urging of Root’s steadily tightening grip. One hand drifts over to play with Root’s nipple as best as she can in the midst of movement causing the headboard to act almost as percussion.

“You like it,” Root says, almost sounding like she’s sobbing from the intense, unrelenting sensation of Shaw undulating, slick and hard against her, “When I’m loud.”

“Fuck—” Shaw nearly cries out, in tandem with Root’s own loud moans as she reaches her climax just before Shaw.

“—off,” Shaw finishes, once the last tremors have faded.

Root pulls Shaw down beside her, kissing her sweetly until Shaw finally pushes her away and makes a face. Root laughs, tired and sated, and pulls Shaw in tight against her, with her hand resting on Shaw’s chest so that she can feel her heartbeat steadily evening out.

They’re silent for a while, drifting slowly off to sleep, before Shaw starts groaning.

“Sameen?” Root asks, alarmed.

“…No,” Shaw groans into Root’s neck. “No.”

“What?” Root’s about as nervous as she can ever remember feeling.

Shaw pauses for a second, then says, “You know one thing you never thought of?”

“What?”

“Guess what kind of system we are?”

“…What?” Root asks again, this time in confusion. “What’s happening?”

“A time-invariant one…” Shaw grumbles, nipping at Root’s neck moodily, almost as though she’s _blaming_ Root for this terrible line.

A slow grin spreads across Root’s face, and Shaw mumbles incoherently and presses her fingers up against Root’s pulse point, feeling it stutter and rapidly increase to match Shaw’s own elevated rate.

“Sameen,” Root says pleasantly, “Is this your way of saying that I’m stuck with you forever?”

“Stop talking,” Shaw orders.

Root can’t help the small giggle that escapes.

“Never mind,” Shaw says heatedly. “You’re ruining this.”

“Oh, Sameen,” Root says, still shaking from barely repressed laughter, and causing Shaw’s body, wrapped up with hers, to shake as well, “I, too, believe that we can be described as irrational… numbers, that is, neverending for as long as—”

“That’s it,” Shaw announces. “You ruined it, you ruined the moment.”

Root snuffles into Shaw’s hair, still giggling.

“Shut up,” Shaw mutters, but Root thinks she can feel the curve of a smile being pressed into her neck right now.

They lay there in silence for some more time, but sleep is the last thing on Root’s mind. Her fingers twitch, and she nudges Shaw gently.

“What?” Shaw sighs.

“I can hear your heartbeat slowing down. Far too slow, if you ask me,” Root says. “Luckily, I have just the thing for that.”

Root can just picture Shaw’s eye roll as she shakes her head and lets Root roll them apart. “What, do you have a defibrillator on hand?”

Smiling mischievously at Shaw, Root reaches under her bed. “ _So_ not the device I was thinking of, Sameen.”


End file.
